ELEVATOR HACK.(maintanace)

No one much likes it when something--an empty cab, an out-of-service subway train, summer--goes by without stopping. It's like a tiny taste of death. This thought came to mind recently when a rumor surfaced about a clever elevator trick. Supposedly, if an elevator passenger simultaneously presses the "door close" button and the button for the floor he is trying to reach, he can override the requests of other passengers and of people waiting for the elevator on other floors. The elevator shifts into express mode, racing directly to the floor of his choosing--becoming, in essence, a private lift. Apparently (that is, according to Internet chatter and what you might call secondhand anecdotal evidence), people (pizza men, college students, hotel guests) have been doing this for years, which might explain why the rest of us have occasionally had the feeling that elevators were passing us by.

The experts, however, say that the idea is nonsense, that elevators are not designed to do this, that people are talking crazy. "It's just not so," Charles Buckman, an elevator and escalator consultant in North Carolina, said the other day. "If it happens, it's just happenstance." He went on, "There's no linkage in the control system between the door-control system and the floor-call system. Saying that one affects the other, that's like saying people in America eat hot dogs, so therefore people in Africa eat hot dogs."

Richard Gladitz, a service manager at Century Elevator, an elevator-maintenance company in Long Island City, concurred. "It really shouldn't operate like that, unless there's something wrong with it," he said. "People will think that someone did something to make it pass by, but it might have something to do with the dispatcher, various elevator-bank issues, something of that nature."

He was apprised of a case involving a woman in an elevator (manufactured by Gurney and serviced by Century) in a prewar apartment building on the Upper East Side who found that she could override the requests from other floors by holding the "door close" button as the elevator passed those floors, the fleetingly perplexed faces of spurned neighbors visible through a window in the door. Gladitz sighed and said, "There's so many misconceptions about elevators." Could it be that engineers had designed elevators to have this door/floor feature but, for the common good, didn't ...