Friday, September 14th, 2007...9:43 am
“Livin’ it up when I’m going down”
While coming back to our 8th-floor office from an early morning coffee break yesterday, six of my co-workers and I took the elevator.
As a practical joke at the expense of the four female co-workers, my friend Mamilad looked at me and our other male colleague and said, “Ok, ready? One, two, three…”, at which point the three of us instinctively jumped in the air and landed with a thud.
Which tilted the elevator.
Which stopped it from running.
Which shut it down. For good.
We pressed every button. Nothing. We used our security cards. Nothing. We smacked the doors. Nothing. We pointed fingers at each other.
The elevator was stuck on the 4th floor, halfway up our otherwise 20-second trip and stubbornly unable to operate.
I pressed the red button, which made the alarm sound. After a few seconds, security came on and asked what was going on.
“We’re stuck in here.”
“Is everyone ok?”
“Yeah, we’re fine.”
“We’ll get you out soon.”
Being stuck in an elevator can do weird things to you. You imagine how long you might be there. You wonder whether you’ll have to crawl through the doors and onto a landing like Keanu Reeves did in Speed. You blame the three guys who thought it’d be funny to jump up and down.
What you don’t do, though, is panic.
For the next 20 minutes of our “ordeal”, the seven of us sat on the floor of the elevator and talked about the following things:
- Other co-workers’ attitudes
- Other co-workers’ odors
- Possible drinking games we can play while waiting
- How many firefighters will break down the doors to rescue us
- Whether we can get the rest of the day off because we’re “just too shaken up to work”
- Who will be the first to hyperventilate
- Climbing through the elevator’s ceiling
- Using physics to determine how fast the elevator would go if it went into a free-fall
- Agreeing that if we jumped a second before impact we’d survive unscathed
- Who we’d eat first if we ended up stuck in there for weeks
This last item was met by a unanimous decision that Cam, a small Vietnamese chick, would be the first to be cannibalized.
“Why?” she asked, incredulous at our collective agreement of her fate.
“Because you’d probably be the tastiest.”
“No way, man, I have my period.”
“We’ll eat around that area.”
Luckily, 10 seconds after this last comment that completely grossed out me and the other two guys, the elevator moved. We pressed the first-floor button and started laughing with relief.
The doors opened at the ground level and we were met by no one.
No firefighters. No security. Just the lobby welcoming us anti-climactically.
“I can’t believe it took us less than 20 minutes to discuss who we’d eat first,” Mamilad said.
“I know,” I said, “even the Uruguayan ruby team that crashed into the Andes waited a few weeks before feasting on each other.”
29 Comments
September 14th, 2007 at 10:02 am
Nice…you went from “No one likes me” to “we’re going to eat the little Vietnamese chick” and breaking the office inside of 90 days.
I can’t wait for your review.
I’m pretty much the shit now.
September 14th, 2007 at 10:31 am
When I was in Virginia Beach I got stuck in an elevator and, when the doors were pryed open, I had to climb up to get out, just like some of the people in Speed.
It would’ve been a lot less harrowing (and a lot less difficult to climb out) had I not been drunk and had it not been 1 in the morning, but who cares about details.
Same thing happened to me in Argentina, but I was 8 so I wasn’t as drunk as you.
September 14th, 2007 at 10:40 am
You know, my dad was supposed to be on that trip (he played rugby with all those guys), but instead got married to my mother and went to Brazil.
Are you serious? That’s incredible. You should write a blog post in which you interview your dad about that.
September 14th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I want to say something about the taste of Arjewtino… but you’ll just accuse me of euphemism again.
There should be a verb for that — euphemising.
September 14th, 2007 at 10:46 am
i got stuck in the elevator at work for 20 minutes by myself when i first started here. the key they had for the elevator didn’t work either so someone from DOT had to come over with some universal key thing. when they finally found me between floors they just left me there because they decided to try and get me to an even landing place. i ended up back on the first floor and walked up six flights of stairs. when i left the building to go home that day i heard the security desk people go, “that was the one that was stuck in the elevator….” i swear i heard elevator whisperings for a month after that from them.
If I know you, and I think I do, I imagine you panicked some. Considering how you freaked out by finding that bug in your apartment, I can’t imagine how you felt being trapped in an elevator.
September 14th, 2007 at 11:03 am
MJ - “the one that was stuck in the elevator” isn’t nearly as bad as the girl I knew who was “the one who got caught on the security camera having sex in the parking garage.”
That one stuck for a little more than a month, from what I understand.
September 14th, 2007 at 11:13 am
didn’t you just start this job? and you’re already making trouble? You MUST be a gub’ment worker!
September 14th, 2007 at 11:37 am
there were no bugs in the elevator so i actually just laughed like, omg, i can’t believe my luck. and then i called everyone on my cell phone and was like you are not going to believe this. i was actually on my cell phone when they found me between floors.
September 14th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Damnit! Now, I have “Love in an Elevator” in my head.
September 14th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
I think we’re all overlooking the real question here, which is this:
Is Cam kosher?
September 14th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
“Whether we can get the rest of the day off because we’re “just too shaken up to work”.”
Sounds like an excuse I would try to use. I’m very good at producing tears when need be.
September 14th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
I’m not a fan of Vietnamese cuisine. Was there any Mexican available?
And, yes, you are the shit. But you already knew that.
September 14th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
You’re definitely the shit. I got stuck in an elevator in the Va Beach when I was a little kid when we were leaving the doc’s office.
My mom is extremely claustrophobic. We had a Pepsi and a box of Whoppers (I have no idea why, we hate both). I was about 7 or 8. It took almost an hour.
Have fun imagining what happened.
September 14th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
meanwhile, Aerosmith is on Sunday night! woo!
September 14th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
i like Vietnamese …but..yeah..not as much as a good as a jewdog
xoxo
September 14th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Getting stuck in an elevator is one of my biggest fears. Which is why, if I can help it, I’ll take the stairs.
September 14th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Hilarious. I got stuck in an elevator downtown a few years ago. I was by myself, though…I actually thought about climbing through the elevator ceiling like John McClane from Die Hard, but that sh*t doesn’t work in real life. Or at least I could not figure out how to make it happen. Maybe Bruce Willis is just more of a man than I am. F*ck it.
September 14th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
As a longtime reader, I understand taking and losing a bet to jump in the C&O Canal and swimming across the Potomac to impress some people. However, jumping up and down in an elevator to scare a co-worker at the office just doesn’t make any sense to me. That may be the dumbest thing that you’ve done and written about.
Oh, Happy New Year!
September 14th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
At least you know the emergency braking system works on the elevator. It’s activated by sudden acceleration, such as that caused by three nimrods simultaneously jumping up and down. : )
September 14th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Cam shouldn’t sell herself short. Think of the relative tastiness of quail.
September 14th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
There was an episode of Mythbusters about that whole “jumping before impact” thing, and they decided that you’d still definitely ’splode. Depends on how much you trust those two dudes though.
September 14th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
so what I want to know is, upon being rescued, did you fess up (to the rescuers) that it was your own damn fault you got stuck?
September 15th, 2007 at 12:30 am
poor girl.
was she banging to get out after ya’ll said that?
did she run from the elevator once you were freed?
lol.
September 15th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Being stuck in the elevator is a rather common occurrence in my life. My elevator in my building here in campus always does that. So I would then press the button and a few seconds later, it would open up again.
But the worst occurrence was actually in the Basilica de Voto Nacional in Quito. I was supposed to take the elevator to the third floor of the bell tower. I was alone, I pressed the button, the doors opened, I went in, pressed the button for the highest floor, the doors closed, and it remained there. The lights turned off, I pressed every button, but nothing happened. I started banging on the door, and they got my out after one hour sitting in total darkness.
September 15th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
A friend took a bus from Chile to Argentina. As usual in the long-distance busses down there, they showed a movie as they were crossing the Andes.
“Alive.”
Perhaps the only other movie almost as inappropriate would have been something about the Donner Party.
September 16th, 2007 at 6:47 am
Did you think about eating little bits of eachother rather than a whole, thereby (hopefully) saving everyone’s lives, but leaving you all equally crippled?
September 16th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Where do Aussies come up with stuff like that? Perhaps too much sun in the Outback….
September 16th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
H, did I forget to tell you that we eat our national emblem? We are a practical folk. Kangaroo is yummy! If we were stuck in an elevator or the Andes, we would probably have a similar philosophy: Eat what is there! LOL!
September 17th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Really? Kangaroo tastes good? I’ve joked about eating kangaroo before, but that was with no prior knowledge that it evidently is a) edible, and b) delicious. Actually, now that I think about it, I joke a lot about eating/fighting Australian indigenous animals…
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