Gladys and Otis

This morning I noticed a curious episode in the ongoing saga of “Man against Machine” or in this case woman against machine. It demonstrates how much people distrust even the most mundane everyday mechanical and electrical systems that we encounter.

This happened after I dropped my daughter off at work, and drove through the parking lot to get back on the main drag where naturally I just missed the light. So I’m sitting there and I notice a lady (I’ll call her Gladys) who was crossing the street directly towards me and only made it half way across before the light changed. So Gladys was stranded at the center divider standing next to one of those buttons that trigger the walk/don’t walk cycles. So I notice that Gladys starts pushing the button over and over as she keeps glancing up at the traffic light.

I can see her shoulder moving just a little so I start counting how many times she is pushing the button; I estimate that it must have been 25 times at least, and all this time she keeps glancing up at the Walk/Don’t Walk sign to see if it is changing. Then Gladys stopped for about ten seconds, and then decided that the stupid control may not have “heard” her and started pushing it again another ten or twelve times. Since this is normally a busy street, all this was happening long before one would expect the light to cycle to Walk again, so I found this all pretty amusing and tried to imagine what was going through her head.

Now everyone probably pushes the button more than once just to make sure that the light control picked up their button press, maybe two or three times just for good measure. This was different though. I was wondering if Gladys actually thought that if she pushed it a whole lot more times, then the control would get the idea that she was in a hurry, switch to a faster cycle and stop the cross traffic sooner. Or maybe she just didn’t trust the system to remember that she had pushed the button, that if there was a lot of traffic, then it would decide that the cars were more important than Gladys and make a conscious decision to make her wait longer.

Something interesting happened then. A man walked up to the crosswalk on my side of the street and noticing that there was a lull in the traffic, just started walking across against the red light. When she saw this guy boldly flaunting the rules, Gladys hesitated and then decided that she wasn’t going to let this guy make her look stupid and decided to take off, anxiously looking both ways to make sure she wasn’t going to get caught breaking the law. Of course, when she was most of the way across the remaining lanes, the light changed anyway at which point she relaxed, probably telling herself that the 35 button pushes did the trick.

I know this all sounds like the musings of someone (me) who should have better things to think about, but I was alone in the car and this is just the kind of thing that people think about when they have nothing better to do whether they admit it or not. So as I headed home, I started thinking what if there was a light on the button thingy that lights up to acknowledge that the unit picked up your command. Would that make Gladys stop after just a couple presses? Maybe not, since we have virtually all seen people press elevator buttons again and again that were already lit up, with the same thought that all this extra pushing would make an impression on the “brain” that runs the elevator.

Unfortunately the elevator brain is probably not that smart, or then again, maybe it is. If we actually programmed elevator and other controls to react to how many times you pushed the button, you would soon find people wearing out the buttons trying to impress Otis the elevator that they were in fact more important than all the other people who might be trying to use the elevator at the same time. Parents would train their kids to stand there and push the button continuously until the elevator got there. And they would do the same thing inside, trying to get the elevator to cruise past floors where people were waiting just because they were “in a hurry.” So maybe Otis knows that people are often self centered and could care less about being fair to the other patrons, and he consciously ignores those extra button presses in an effort to be impartial.

Of course, we all know in our hearts that Otis gets annoyed and actually takes his time when someone does that just to teach them a lesson. Obviously Gladys didn’t understand this fact.