WASHINGTON — The nation’s approximately 4.8 billion staircases issued a joint statement Tuesday demanding a formal apology from Greg Pellham, 41, who on Monday morning took the second-floor stairs at Hollis & Dunmore Regional Insurance two at a time in full view of a coworker, then reportedly slowed to a limp by the third flight.

“We are built for one at a time,” read the statement, released through the American Council of Load-Bearing Inclines. “That is the entire design. Mr. Pellham treated us as a stage for a brief, doomed display of vigor, and then he left us to absorb the consequences, which included a audible wheeze and a hamstring pull he described as ‘nothing.’”

According to witnesses, Pellham spotted coworker Dana Ostrowski near the top of the stairwell and accelerated, skipping every other step with what one observer called “the confidence of a man who last jogged in 2014.” He reached the landing, gripped the railing, and began examining his phone with intense interest.

“He wasn’t reading anything,” said the Council’s spokesperson, Dr. Halvard Quimby-Nesbitt, a senior fellow in Vertical Circulation Ethics at the Institute for the Dignity of Municipal Infrastructure. “The screen was off. We have the footage. The stairs have the footage. Stairs see everything.”

The statement noted that staircases have long tolerated misuse, including being sat on at parties, used as storage for laundry that is “definitely going up later,” and descended in socks. But the Council said the two-at-a-time gambit crosses a line by weaponizing the stairs’ reliability against them.

“We held him,” said the statement. “Every step. He did not fall. And this is the thanks we get: a man pretending to take a call from nobody at the halfway point.”

Pellham, reached at his desk, denied the allegations. “I was just in a hurry,” he said, in a voice described by a nearby colleague as “thin.” He added that he had “honestly barely noticed” the stairs, a remark the Council called “the real injury.”

“We were a prop. We have always been a prop. But we used to be a prop for ambition, not for a man trying to seem like he plays rec soccer.”

Staircases across the country have reportedly begun to coordinate. Escalators, who have long resented the stairs’ moral authority, issued a short statement of support, then added that they would “never make a man feel this way,” before resuming their steady, indifferent motion.

The Council has requested that Pellham return to the stairwell and take the steps one at a time, “slowly, with a hand on the rail, and with no one watching,” as a gesture of reconciliation. Failing that, it said, the stairs would consider a more passive form of protest, such as becoming slightly longer.

At press time, Pellham had taken the elevator down to the lobby, a decision the Council called “a start.”