It is not, despite appearances, a democracy. Every button on the panel promises equal access to every floor, but in practice three of them do all the work, lobby, and whichever two floors house the largest departments, while the rest wait, sometimes for entire fiscal quarters, to be touched by anyone at all. The button for the fourteenth floor, home to a records archive nobody visits, has visibly less wear than its neighbors, a difference you can feel with a thumb if you're the sort of person who checks.
Its most reliable behavior is the double-press: a rider, uncertain whether the first press registered, presses again, and again, sometimes a third time, though the panel has no mechanism that rewards insistence. The elevator arrives at its own pace regardless. Riders also, near-universally, press the door-close button while already descending, a gesture the guide's advisory panel could not confirm does anything at all, and suspects exists purely to give restless hands somewhere to go.
By late afternoon the numbers on the busiest buttons have worn to a faint outline, the plastic beneath gone shiny and grey, legible mostly by memory. A minor repair committee reviewed the panel last spring and voted, six to one, to leave the worn buttons as they were rather than replace the whole unit. The dissenting vote was never explained.