Trapped in an elevator
By Brendan Loy
The New Yorker last month ran a fascinating, lengthy article about elevators. I just stumbled upon it today. It's worth a read if you've got the time. I found this snippet particularly interesting:
In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command.
The article is framed by the story of Nicholas White, an employee in a New York high-rise building who once got trapped in the elevator for 41 hours. Here's the time-lapse security footage of his ordeal, via the New York Times's Health blog. As the New Yorker article reveals, White ultimately quit his job and sued the company that owned its building, only to settle for a piddling amount after four years of legal strife. His life is pretty much in shambles now, all because of a sequence of events that started with his getting trapped in an elevator after stepping outside for a cigarette on a Friday night.
Anyway, the Times blog post asks for readers' stories about elevator ordeals. Hey, I've got one! I was trapped in an elevator once, in France. The "ordeal" only lasted maybe two or three minutes, but it happened in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language, and I was only seven years old at the time, and I solved the problem! That makes it at least somewhat interesting, right?
The story goes like this. I was with my Mom and Dad at the tail end of our summer vacation in France. Specifically, we were leaving our Paris hotel, the Hotel Novanox, bound for the airport to catch our flight back to New York. The date, unless I'm very much mistaken, was July 4, 1989. (Irrelevant side note: Mikhail Gorbachev was arriving in Paris that day -- or maybe the next day? -- for some kind of big-deal summit thingy.)
My Dad and I were on the elevator. My Mom, the only fluent French-speaker in our family, wasn't. She was actually booked on a different flight to NYC, the next day, and thus I believe she was either back in the hotel room or else waiting for us in the lobby, to see us off.
Anyway, when the elevator got to the lobby, the door wouldn't open. We tried going back up a floor or two; it still wouldn't open. Back down to the lobby again; no luck. If I remember correctly, there were perhaps a half-dozen people in the elevator -- including, I think, a hotel employee of some kind -- but nobody seemed quite sure what to do. But then I noticed something. Watching the light shine through the crack of the door as we traveled up and down, it seemed like the elevator car was landing a foot or two below where it was supposed to. So, I thought, why don't we try going to the basement? I figured the elevator couldn't go below the basement.
I'm not sure how I communicated this idea to the others in the elevator (aside from my Dad, of course). Maybe the hotel employee spoke English; or maybe my Dad, who can speak some conversational French, clumsily translated; or maybe I just pushed the button. I don't remember. Regardless, we went to the basement, and -- as the locals might say -- Voila! The seven-year-old American tourist had saved the day. :) The doors did indeed open when we reached the basement, and we climbed the stairs up to the lobby. My Dad and I caught our flight with no problem.
So... what about y'all? Have any of you ever been trapped in an elevator?
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