Yeah, that surprised me, too. I was with a coworker who was into me, so I said, “Hey, what happens if I do this?” and pressed the button, thinking that she’d laugh and I’d move in for a kiss. Not my smoothest move. 
I remember at least one building where the emergency stop wouldn’t sound an alarm (long, long time ago). People would stop the elevator to have sex. The alarm was added to stop that.
Or maybe that was the story? It was a long, LONG time ago
Better to think outside the box, climb through the little door on the roof, enjoy the ups and downs, and hope no one needs to go to the highest floor. 
All you’d have to do is grimace, duck down, and turn your head sideways. The mechanism will come within inches of your head and stop.
Omg you’ve stumbled upon one of my worst nightmares. When I was a little kid I saw an episode of Matlock where someone put a bomb on an elevator and I’ve been afraid of elevators ever since. In fact I pretty much expected bombs to be everywhere the way they were on TV. I wouldn’t let my Mom leave me in the car alone because I thought someone would crawl under the car and plant a bomb there. Haven’t encountered one yet.
There’s a word for that; elevator surfing, and as you might guess, it’s dangerous. Particularly so when the kids doing it decide to jump from one elevator to the other. There are periodically stories in the papers about a kid getting killed doing this.
The elevators in my college dorm were like the opposite – there was a button that would just ring the alarm bell without stopping the elevator (I assume there was also an emergency stop button, but it was so long ago I don’t really remember). Students liked to just ring the bell for fun as they were riding the elevator.
It’s called “Natural Selection.”
Some years ago I saw a made-for-TV murder mystery. On the ground floor of a modern building was an elevator and it had an old-fashioned floor indicator with a dial and pointer. “That’s oddly out of place,” I thought. Then the murder happened.
The victim was in the elevator and the murderer contrived to make it stop about four feet short of the floor she wanted, then open the doors. Flustered, she levered herself up and as she started to pull out the rest of the way the doors closed on her waist. Then the cabin started to move down, cut to the ground floor where you see the pointer move to a point halfway between the floors, hesitate, then move on.
“Aha!”
Not too common, but it has happened: the car will respond to where ever someone twists the dial. There’s an Arbuckle, or maybe Keaton, where the guy yanks the dial to the right, and the car comes crashing out of the roof of the building.
I remember that scene. I saw it in a movie about college students inventing a fictional person that they use to scam for penny ante stuff. Then, an actual bad guy discovers their scheme and starts to kill off the students so he can take over the fictional persona for his own nefarious purposes. I think it was called Paper Man. Also, it was one of the early movies to incorporate the idea of hacking (kinda), because the paper man was actually created using computer files/accounts.
When someone arrives on TV or in the movies, after a long trip, they have plenty of things to do. But somehow immediately going to the bathroom is not one of them.
“Death Row Inmates” in fiction are plentiful, so plentiful in fact you can use them as a steady stream for your live human experimentation programs or as expendable security for your top secret government projects and nobody in the general public will notice.
I swear in the SCP universe with the amount of death row inmates they go through speeding must be a death row offensive to keep up with demand.
A car is driving down the road, and one of the passengers is annoying the driver, so the driver parks the car in the middle of a busy intersection, shuts off the engine, and refuses to move until the offending passenger gets out and walks.
People who claim to see UFOs are immediately sent to the nuthouse or immediately placed under psychiatric evaluation even if the government isn’t actively covering it up.
When I was in grad school, we had an elevator with an Emergency Stop that everyone routinely used to stop the elevator for extended periods while loading/unloading stuff.
Nothin’ to be afraid of.
Ive never even seen an emergency stop in an elevator. Nothibg other than a hold button in a freight elevator.
A wealthy and successful business or wealthy landowner can decide to shut down, buy out, or evict a less prosperous (but typically more spunky and fun-loving) rival or even an entire neighborhood.
The only legal process, such as there is one, is typically a sinister and/or pretentious representative (often wearing comically out of place attire such as dress shoes at a ski resort or a business suit at the beach) serving an official notice with some stated countdown…
The takeover can typically be averted through either the discovery of a lost treasure (typically subject to either maritime salvage law or the rule of “finders keepers…”), winning a mismatched competition, and/or by throwing a kick-ass party.
The winners are pardoned from any laws broken during the course of these activities, up to and including trespassing, vandalism, assault and battery, damage to property, theft, and/or any criminality associated with the death of anyone involved (i.e. henchmen killed in shoot-outs, car chases, falling out of aircraft, by ancient booby traps, etc.).
That’s a great post. But Local Hero is still one of my favourite movies.
My aunt, normally extremely law-abiding, had her first experience with stimulants when she had three exams on the same day in college. She claimed it was just caffeine pills, and she took about 5,000mg over about 4 hours, staying up more than 24 hours. Since I was 16 at the time, I wonder now if it was just caffeine-- albeit, since she wasn’t arrested, possibly.
She was a college freshman or sophomore, at the University of Chicago, just for background, and an international student from Greece, in the US for the first time. At 15 or 16, she had spent a year in the UK as an exchange student, and English is a public school subject in Greece. Also, she was about 5’ even, and very cute at 19 - 20, which is how old she would have been at the time.
What she did was exceed the speed limit on what was technically the highway (beltway), but close enough to a residential area to be a 45mph zone. It was the 70s, and she was driving a big, V-8 car, at least 10 years old, and she was going about 65, so a cop takes off after her.
She speeds up. They go several miles, and eventually he starts to catch up, and gets close enough to bullhorn her to pull over.
She does, and jumps out of the car, and yells at him something along the lines of “why are you stopping? I thought you had to get to some big emergency! I was trying to drive fast enough that I didn’t get in the way of your big emergency!”
Somehow, she did not get a ticket, just a warning, and a verbal order to drive straight home-- but in the 70s, the police also dealt with drunks that way.
I asked her if she really thought that or just said it at the time. She said that when she first took off, she knew the law, but by the time she pulled over, she’d forgotten it.
She also said she drove straight home and passed out on the couch, not even making it to her bedroom.