Wean is Shabbat Friendly?
On Shabbat, Jews are not to parttake in physical activity, work, or use contraptions that use electricity voluntarily – which means one cannot press the buttons of an elevator. Many institutions use what are known as “shabbat elevators”, which are elevators that stop and open at every floor, such that observant jews could go onto a different floor while still obeying G-d. One example of such an institution that uses this technology is Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon University, a prestigious T5 tech school nestled in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. The way these elevators are shabbat compliant is rather unique – rather than using code that activates on a Friday evening sunset to enable Shabbat mode, the University provides a multitude of goyish students to enter and exit at each floor. If one were to, lets say, try to traverse from floor 4 to 7, a very common commute here, the following scene would play out: someone calls the elevator at floor 4, as is common, and presses the button for floor 5 because they are a lazy fuck that cannot bother to use the stairs. Once you are on the elevator and it gets to floor 5, this loser exits and a different schmuck enters and presses the button for floor 6. Once there, the same scene plays out. If an observant Jew were to be on this elevator, Hashem would be very pleased. However, this method of using human labor to turn elevators into Shabbat machines has a major oversight – hoards of lazy people usually aren’t on floors 1, 2, 3, 8, or 9, which means that a nice jewish boy, girl, or neither would have to press the buttons themselves on these levels. Hopefully, the university supplies incentives to increase the student population at these floors, or just catches up to the rest of the world on Shabbat elevator technology.