Did anyone press the button?

In Vancouver, and indeed in many places on the planet, we have pedestrian controlled cross-walks. This means a pedestrian can press a button on a post at a corner, and when the timing is appropriate for the greater traffic flow, the motorized traffic will get a red light and the pedestrian is then mostly safe to cross the street without too much fear of being hit by a motorized vehicle. (Note the caveats “mostly” and “too much” are from my advanced years of experience that make me not automatically trust any human in control of a motorized vehicle, you still have to look before you cross.)

Also, we have elevators which are summoned by pressing a button usually found on a panel on the wall beside the elevator doors.

So when do you press the buttons? When you want the light to turn red and the pedestrian sign to light up, or the elevator to come to your floor and the door to open.

That's why it's so much fun to sit and watch people.

I admit I am assuming that everyone is familiar with this button pressing action. But it is so much fun to be sitting at a bus stop watching as people slowly congregate at the corner of a cross roads, waiting for a red light that none of them have requested by pressing the button. It's not just one person who may never have pressed a button and doesn't know about it, but it's 4 corners full of people of various ages, backgrounds, and group sizes, next to 4 different buttons, one on each corner.

Surely one of them must know about pressing the button!

Oh finally, someone presses the button! The light changes and people start moving. Oh relief! I thought they'd all be stuck forever!

So why are people so reluctant to press a button? I think it's from experiences with overly hostile elevator riders.

I have seen people get downright pissed off at strangers because they have come up and pressed the button for the elevator when it has already been pressed. They take it as a personal affront, as if the strangers either didn't acknowledge their existence, or saw them and assumed they were too stupid to press the button themselves. These angry people can then go on and on about the assumed affront for half an hour after they get off the elevator.

Message to the angry people: You know, it's not always about you.

Sometimes people are in the midst of their own thoughts, and just haven't noticed you, you're not Elvis. Sometimes it's hard to see if the light around the button is glowing, or people have vision problems. Sometimes people who are talking are in mid-sentence and the pressing is a tangible note to punctuate something they are saying. But sadly, sometimes people are just like you and need to hit something, the only socially acceptable thing to hit is that little button with the glowing light.

If you walk around downtown Vancouver, or likely in the downtown core of many other cities, you will see homeless people, angry homeless people. These people will curse bad drivers in traffic with a variety of racial slurs, gender-specific insults, and general swears and spitting. They will curse other people who are walking down the same street. They will curse the government, health-care workers, squirrels, anything on the planet actually. But if you look closely, they aren't that much different than the business-suite attired elevator riders who are cursing the people who hit the elevator button. They may smell worse, and are in more danger of falling over their own feet, but the cloud of rage that surrounds them is just like the one around the angry elevator rider.

So relax. It's just a button. Press it if you want to. Don't worry if someone has already pressed it. Don't take it personally if someone else presses it too. You all want the same thing anyway.

And if that's not enough, just remember that you may be providing some very humorous viewing for strangers at the bus stop!