Elevators

While leaving work the other evening, I began to pontificate upon another topic which we typically overlook due to its common presence: elevators. I bet you can't tell where I was when I began said pontification. Oh? You guessed in an elevator? Damn. Okay, maybe you can. That aside, I'll be spending the next few paragraphs enlightening you about elevators: the good, the bad, and maybe a story or two. I think we should start with my general distaste for elevators. I know they are useful, especially in buildings with more than four floors. I work on the eleventh floor of my office building, but there are many times I find myself wishing we had a staircase. Here are my main complaints with elevators:

Picking which one will open first

This only applies in buildings with more than one elevator. You go and hit the button to go up or down, and there are two or more elevators that respond to the button, and you stand there trying to guess which door will open. This is even more awkward when other people are waiting for you, and exceptionally awkward when there are more people trying to get on the elevator than can fit. Then, if you guess wrong, you're shit-out-of-luck.

The latecomer

Whenever you are in a hurry to get somewhere via elevator, there is inevitably somebody at the end of the hallway yelling, "Hold the elevator, please! I'm almost there!" So everyone in the elevator must wait on this asshole who thinks they're so important that they can't be bothered to wait another 30 seconds for the next elevator. One day I was walking into work when I saw an ancient relic of a woman shuffling at a blazing two feet per minute into my building. She had an aide with her, and I passed them to go inside. I got to the elevator, hit the "up" button and waited. It took a bit longer than normal for one of the three elevators that go above the tenth floor to arrive down in the lobby. I went in, along with several other people. Right before the door closes, an arm shoots into the gap with the righteous speed of a caretaker of the elderly and decrepit. "Please wait, she's almost here," I hear the aide say. Everyone in the elevator had seen the osteoporotic dinosaur, and I was surprised that the aide didn't burst into flame right there from the concentrated amount of hate being directed towards her by my fellow elevator occupants.

Yes, hatred is combustible.

"Please be patient, we'll all be there some day." The bimbo had the nerve not only to patronize us, but also to remind us of the fleeting nature of youth right before we all went to waste yet another day of our lives stuck in an office. We stood in the elevator for literally two minutes while we waited for the old woman who avoiding the grim reaper by the skin of her false teeth. It was infuriating; nobody said anything, nobody even gave telling glances to one another or the aide, who continued to condescend to us as if we weren't being patient enough. She wouldn't stop talking down to us about being patient, which is like Hitler trying to tell Jesus the importance of being a good person. This was the woman who was so impatient she had to hold up an entire elevator so she didn't have to wait for another, even though, I guarantee, at least three more elevators could have come before the fossil made it to the one her aide had commandeered.

Selecting your floor

Once everyone crams into the elevator, everyone tried to squeeze towards the buttons to hit their floor. When it's really crowded, you may hear something akin to, "can you hit eight for me, please?" A reasonable request, except for when I'm going higher than eight. Every stop between where I am and the floor to which I'm going is comparable to sitting in traffic. Worse is when somebody on another floor is waiting for the elevator. The light on that floor doesn't show, but the elevator stops anyway, and half the time when the door opens there is nobody there. Somebody either hit the wrong direction (I understand, the difference between up and down is utterly perplexing) or hit the button just to be an asshole. Oh, and don't even get me started on little kids who think it's a fun game to hit all the buttons in the elevator. I have a fun game I'd like to show them.

My favorite game, followed closely by "Let's play in traffic."

Where the hell am I supposed to look?

Probably one of the most uncomfortable things for me in an elevator is where to look when there are other people in there with you. Most elevators have at least one reflective wall, making it really hard to avoid eye contact with your elevator passengers. Even trying to stare ahead of you, the reflective surface makes it to where you're nearly staring the other passengers in the eye. This is bad, because it becomes painfully obvious that everyone is trying really hard to not interact with anyone else. Then you get the random talkers, who think, because the mirror-wall makes it seem like you're making reflected eye-contact, that it's a good time to bust out conversational gems like, "Hot enough for you outside?" or, "Hey, at least it's Friday," or, "Excuse me, would you mind sucker-punching me in the larynx?"

Okay, I just wish they'd say the last one.

I could probably write a whole thesis paper on the unsavory aspects of elevators, but, instead, I will move on to the one thing I enjoy about elevators. I can only enjoy this when alone in an elevator with hand rails. I find it very amusing to lift myself off the floor using the hand rails and lift myself a few inches several times. I find it oddly fun to feel the g-force fluctuate with the speed and direction of the elevator. I like feeling really heavy when traveling up, with the very end making my body weight seem like nothing as it slows, and vice versa when the elevator travels downward. This reminds me of a story.

I believe it was the winter break of my senior year of high school. A group of aproximately eight of us decided to go to Centennial Olympic Park where they had set up an ice-skating rink. Not wanting to navigate downtown Atlanta traffic, my friends and I decided to take MARTA (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, for my imaginary readers unfamiliar with Atlanta). We parked on the third floor of the parking deck and meandered to the elevator. We piled into the elevator, and for shits and giggle, without having consulted anybody about any kind of plan or giving any intentions, when the doors closed I simply said, "One, two, three!" Here is how events unfolded.

In case the pictures weren't clear, on the count of three, everyone in the elevator jumped. We had never done this before, and it's not like anybody had said, "Hey, we should count to three and all jump!" I simply counted to three, and everybody jumped on cue. I was not expecting this. Neither was the elevator. In less than two seconds we went from the third floor to right between the first and second floor. We basically caused the elevator to free fall about ten to fifteen feet before the emergency cables caught us. After we picked ourselves up off the ground, we soon realized what we had done. We tried to open the doors, but we couldn't get them open more than a crack, through which we were able to see the floor/ceiling dividing the first and second floors. After being in there for about fifteen minutes, some of the girls began to panic a little bit. Then, after about half an hour...

Everyone knows human eyes glow in the dark.

Pandemonium. You would have thought we were in a horror movie. Not all the girls went into OMGWTFWE'REGONNADIE mode, but even one is too many. We waited around in the dark for another fifteen minutes or so before the lights came back on, and old mechanic knocked on the door and said he was working to get us out. It was about another fifteen minutes before we emerged from the elevator-turned-Alcatraz. So it was only an hour, nowhere near as bad as it was for this guy, but still not fun. We then took the train to the stop closest to Centennial, walked a few blocks and finally got to the park. There we sat, looked at the skating rink, and, being the spoiled suburban high school kids we were, turned our noses up and refused to pay $10 to skate on it because, "that ice rink is like the size of my garage." I'd like to blame someone else for that condescending comment, but alas, I have not always been as amazingly talented, athletic, sexy, and most of all as humble as I am now.