Button pushing, and the downfall of civilization...

A nefarious and insidious plague is sweeping the world! Button pushing has become an epidemic of biblical proportions that must be dealt with immediately! What is button pushing you ask from your throne of sweet naive ignorance?

Every morning, mild-mannered secretary Stephen comes into work to see the shining lobby of his office, a beacon of the progress and economical innovation that the Western World has striven to achieve these many centuries. That effort, we will see, was for naught. For along with the glory of individually packaged crème-filled cakes, Sprite, and $.50 Mondays at the dollar theater, it also begot the most heinous of all evils…Button Pushers!

Across the lobby of the beautiful office building lies the elevator, hereafter known as the Box Of Selfishness And Doom (BOSAD). The BOSAD will turn even the most normal and well adjusted individual into a button pusher. All it requires to work its twisted blend of magic and evil is a little time lost. The few extra minutes it took the formerly well adjusted individual to pet the dog can be enough. The time lost to expressing love for ones wife and children. The extra-long column in the newspaper that morning, any of these things, any one of these things is all it takes.

As mild-mannered secretary Stephen approaches the BOSAD each morning, he will look up from his customary moment of reverence and see glistening in the eyes of the BOSAD’s lone occupant that memory of time lost, and opportunity squandered. Then the evil begins. The occupant, who not moments ago was well-adjusted, will look Stephen in the eye, then reach to press the button for his desired floor. He will look at Stephen once more from across the expanse. He will then reach down with his finger and press the close door button, never taking his gaze from the secretary. The glisten in his eye has turned to cold and unfettered hatred towards all who would make him accountable for his own lack of foresight earlier that morning.

It is with this imagined wrong that he is comfortable looking the secretary in the eye as he brings his hand down and presses the button with all the self-satisfied arrogance of one who has, after years of plotting, finally destroyed all those who oppose him.

Stephen will stand there, his head hung in shame at what the world has become. He will weep a tear or two for the horrifying reality that is humanity, then board his own elevator. For him, he tells himself, it will never be a BOSAD, but merely an elevator. He looks up and offers a sad but sincere smile to the occupant that joins him on his upward journey.

The one whom he imagines will be his new friend reaches over and presses the button for his required floor. His hand hovers. He looks out the doors at the throngs approaching the elevator and, with the same glisten in his eye, he presses the close door button.