Pressumption

pressumption (n.) — pre-SUMP-shun. The conviction, held by people who know perfectly well how lifts work, that an additional press of the call button communicates urgency to the building. Also: the quiet belief that a second press is noted somewhere, by someone, and acted upon with fresh determination.

From press, and presumption, in the sense of a claim made without any grounds whatsoever. The word covers the whole family: the crossing button tapped nine times, the microwave door opened and shut to hurry it along, the remote control pointed harder at the television, and the seatbelt tugged twice in the belief that this improves it. In each case the machine has already heard you. The extra presses are for your benefit, not for its. Each one is a small vote of no confidence in the press before it, cast by the very same person who made it. Nobody has ever won that vote.

The solitary form is mild and mostly harmless. A person alone in a hallway, perhaps on the way back from the café next door, presses the button, waits four seconds and presses it again, firmly, with the flat of the thumb, as though the first press had only been a draft. The lift, which was on the ninth floor and has not changed its plans, arrives exactly when it was always going to. The person feels the second press was probably what did it. Should the lift stop at every floor on the way down, this is taken as a sign that other people have been pressing less sincerely.

The social form is where it becomes interesting. When somebody presses a button you have already pressed, you are being told, politely and without words, that your press is not trusted. Etiquette requires you to say nothing and look mildly at the doors. If you press it again after them, the situation escalates into a negotiation nobody can afford to acknowledge, and both parties leave the lift as strangers of a specific new kind.

The real thing behind the joke is the oldest problem with waiting: it is far easier to bear when you have done something. Pressing a button is doing something. Pressing it twice feels like doing twice as much, and our hands do not know any better, even when our heads do. A lit button is a small promise that the wait is being dealt with, and pressumption is simply the urge to keep renewing that promise while the doors stay shut. Nobody believes in it, exactly. Nobody quite stops doing it, either.

Usage: They stood in a shared pressumption for eleven floors, each having pressed the button twice, neither having mentioned it, both quietly certain the lift had come faster than it otherwise would.