Love In An Elevator

Nick Paumgarten's piece on elevators and the dull peril of being trapped in them stops just short of literary journalistic brilliance.  Not that there's anything wrong with the article per se.  It just fails to capture the existential horror of elevator entrapment.  How would I know?

Glad you asked.

Three years ago, I spent the better part of an hour trapped in an elevator.  I'd rushed to the Humanities Instructional Building to make some copies before an 8 a.m. class and so instead of bounding up four flights of stairs I chose to take the elevator.*  The elevators in HIB have a hitch.  They overshoot every floor by about an inch and then ... hang ... there ... for a few beats before settling down.  You get used to it.  So I pressed the button, flew up four stories and was hanging there for a few beats ... and then a few more ... and then a few more ... and so with great annoyance (feigned ostentatiously for a nonexistent audience) I pressed the "Door Open" button.

But nothing happened.

Then I tried to go to the second floor and pressed the button and it lit up.

But nothing happened.

So I hit the button with the fire and the ax on it.  The one that requires a key to work.  Because maybe if they knew someone was fucking with important buttons in the elevator they would send someone to reprimand them. 

But nothing happened. 

At this point I was about five minutes into my own hanging.  The damn thing wouldn't settle and so I panicked.  I started pacing frantically and I checked my watch and I knew I would be late for class because you know and why am I still hanging inches above my point of egress but then wait a minute I'm an inch from the floor I want to be on but am in fact floating in an elevator shaft four stories up with a two-thousand pound counterweight aimed at my head and maybe I ought to take a breath or two and consider the seriousness of my predicament and so with great consideration I jumped in the air and slammed my feet into the floor.

I stomped and stomped thinking that I might loosen what normally unhitched and allowed the elevator to settle.  Twenty minutes later I stopped.  I figured the noise I'd made would alert someone that something was wrong with the elevators. 

It didn't. 

I resigned myself to skipping class on account of having the best of all possible excuses shortly after dismissing the possibility that there's only so much air in an elevator and there was no chance I'd suffocate and that the worse case scenario was that I'd drink my water and eat my granola bar and have to evacuate savagely into or onto an improvised something but despite the calm I convinced myself I felt it dawned on me that I was breathless and hyperventilating and that if this fucking elevator didn't fucking settle in the next fucking minute I'd fucking fuck decorum and press these useless fucking buttons like a rat with an orgasm-lever because I wasn't about to die in an elevator and then for no reason I could discern the damn thing settled.

With a pleasant ding. 

The doors opened and five or six very annoyed people were looking at me.  Seems they'd been waiting for the elevator.  I like to imagine I snarled menacingly upon egress but I have a feeling my face registered my inchoate insanity. 

I'd been trapped in the elevator for a little more than an hour all told but if you'd asked me then I'd just harrowed hell.  Paumgarten's article doesn't quite articulate the sheer horror of being stuck in an elevator, which is less like a litigious inconvenience than an existentialist nightmare.

---

*I'm not that lazy.  Check out this picture of HIB and imagine having to run from one side of it to the other to reach each staircase.  The elevator goes up.  The staircases crisscross the building in a beautiful but  maximally inconvenient manner.

Comments

[Dana Nguyen]

OMG I miss the HIB. Although those stairs are quite dangerous--they are not spaced well, and many a person has fallen, painfully, from the computer lab. I know, because one of my best friends did, and she still has a scar. I remember spending hours there in my Humanities Honors two-year proseminars, and wrote so many 10-15 page papers in the computer lab. I used to have tons of 3.5 floppies. I miss college.

[sharon]

At college in Wales before I went to university, the lift in our residential block was ancient, and seemed to spend nearly as much time being mended as actually working. So it was always asking for trouble to get into it. And I just happened to be the very last person to ever use it before it died completely. Time really does pass very very slowly when you're stuck inside a lift on your own. But at least the emergency button worked!

[va]

I must have learned the lessons of existentialism pretty well, because when I got stuck in an elevator the day I moved into college, I spent a few minutes ringing some bell, and then sat down, resigned to whatever would befall me. Forty-five minutes later it descended into the basement, and I walked out to zero fanfare. Then I found my parents, who were helping me move in. They hadn't missed me. I never mentioned what happened until right now.

[Jake]

Don't worry VA. I love you. At least someone out there does.

[The Constructivist]

You never considered the action hero climb onto the top of the elevator and shimmy up the wire thingy thing in that entire hour? Shame on you!

[bill benzon]

Have you read Robert Coover's "The Elevator"?

[choephorIandI]

41 hours:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_bMhNI_TY8&feature=related

[ajay]

The hatch is there for people to get in (such as emergency workers), not for people to get out, try elevator surfing, fall off and die. For this reason it is padlocked from the outside.

If you carry with you a long, hollow iron alloy rod, some flexible rubber tubing and a small canister of oxygen, you could improvise a thermic lance and cut your way out through the elevator doors and the wall of the elevator shaft. You might then have to pay for the repairs, though.
I would not recommend using field-expedient shaped charges to escape from a stuck elevator.