The broken elevator button
My building has two elevators. The button for my floor in the left elevator was broken. Not a big deal, but as someone who has trouble walking down stairs due to a metal knee, it was mildly disruptive. I'd end up trying to trick the elevators so I could the right elevator, which was working normally.
That got me thinking. There's only two buttons to call an elevator, up or down. The user does not get to choose which one comes to them.
I started daydreaming about having having two additional buttons, to allow me to chose whether I get the left or right elevator. In theory that'd allow people to bypass the problem.
Nobody else had reported this problem, despite it having been broken for a while. If I didn’t have a knee problem, would I have reported it? Would I have reported it if I could always using the other elevator each time?
By being forced to repeatedly be slightly inconvenienced, I was encouraged to report the problem and it was fixed. Adding a workaround so I could’ve just used the other elevator reliably might’ve meant I would just ignore the problem, and it’d stay broken.
This happens all the time in many different contexts. Bugs in codebases will be ignored until it either causes a big enough of a problem for people to fix it, or when there’s not much else to do. Hacks will be introduced to workaround bugs, but not directly fix them. If a codebase only has one way to do something, then problems with that code path will usually be more urgent than in a codebase with multiple ways to achieve the same thing.
Elevators in the office were broken for a day, and we were recommended to use the service elevator. The next day the elevators broke again, so I got in the service elevator. The doors closed, but I was unable to operate the control panel. Not even to open the doors! I was stuck in the elevator. I spent a couple of minutes deciding if I should call for help before figuring out I could force the doors open.
Perhaps there’s a lesson in there too, about workarounds eventually failing and leaving people trapped in elevators.