{"id":2510,"date":"2008-04-20T10:12:09","date_gmt":"2008-04-20T10:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/20\/stuck-in-an-elevator\/"},"modified":"2008-04-20T10:12:09","modified_gmt":"2008-04-20T10:12:09","slug":"stuck-in-an-elevator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/20\/stuck-in-an-elevator\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuck in an Elevator"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott Eric Kaufman, inspired by this piece in The New Yorker<\/cite><\/a>, relates his own tale of being stuck in an elevator<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve also found myself stuck in an elevator, not once, but twice. Weirdly, both times were in Charlottesville, VA.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first was in college, on a spring break trip with the rugby club. Several of us went out on a beer run (this despite the fact that I was 18 and had no ID), and on coming back, we all piled into the elevator of the dive-y little hotel we were staying in. Shockingly enough, ten rugby players and six cases of beer turned out to be more weight than the elevator could handle, and it got stuck between floors. We were rescued by a hotel employee who brought the other elevator up parallel to ours, and transferred a few people over to it through a connecting door.<\/p>\n

That wasn’t too bad, because there were a bunch of us, and we could laugh and joke about it. The other occasion, at a much nicer hotel, was after my cousin’s wedding.<\/p>\n

Kate and I had ended up with rooms on the top floor of the hotel, which required us to swipe the key card before we could press the button for our floor. She went up to bed a little bit before I did, as I finished my beer and said my goodbyes to various relatives.<\/p>\n

I got into the elevator, swiped the card, hit the button, and watched the pretty lights. 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… 7… 8… … … The “8” went out, but the “9” never lit up. The elevator had clearly stopped moving, but the doors didn’t open.<\/p>\n

I poked at a few buttons, and nothing much happened. I swiped the key card again, nothing. More button-poking. Nothing.<\/p>\n

“OK. The elevator is stuck,” I said. I’m incredibly perceptive– it comes from being a scientist. “I’ll just use the handy emergency phone to call the lobby and get it unstuck.”<\/p>\n

I’m not sure quite what I expected from the emergency phone, but a soft hissing noise wasn’t it. And it’s not like it had buttons to dial 911 with– all I could do was jiggle the cradle, which did noting.<\/p>\n

“OK, there’s an alarm button– I’ll hit that.” That turned out to set a very loud bell to ringing in the car<\/strong>. It didn’t bring any help, and the noise got real old, real fast. “Emergency Stop” rang the same bell, as far as I could tell.<\/p>\n

At this point, I started thinking about my situation, and recalled that the only things near the elevator on the ninth floor were conference rooms– our room was one of the first on the hall, and it was four or five doors away. The chances of anybody hearing the alarm bell and calling the desk about it were pretty much nil (it was after midnight). So I set about getting myself out of the car.<\/p>\n

Prying the inside doors open was easy enough, and revealed that the elevator had stopped two or three feet short of the ninth floor. The outer doors, however, were held by some sort of security latch, presumably to prevent people from opening them from the outside, and jumping or falling into the shaft.<\/p>\n

If you ever find yourself in this situation, I can now tell you that the latch on at least one popular type of elevator is located about two thirds of the way up on the left panel of the external door as seen from inside the elevator. At the time, this required a lot of blind poking around up in the works– I got one foot up on the ledge that was the start of the ninth floor, and sort of batted around randomly until I hit something.<\/p>\n

That got the outer doors open, which left me the prospect of climbing through them. With the mental image of some idiot down at the unstaffed front desk noticing the “stuck elevator” light at last, and hitting the “unstick” button with me halfway through the door. I was pretty pissed off by this time, though, so I hit the “Emergency Stop” button, and climbed out as fast as I could manage.<\/p>\n

To top it all off, when I got to the room, I couldn’t get the key card to work. Natuarlly, I accepted this with grace and dignity, and pound on the door hard enough to rattle the walls. Kate was a little alarmed when she let me in…<\/p>\n

The front-desk staff, when they finally answered the phone (after about twenty rings) weren’t real happy about the yelling, either.<\/p>\n

So, anyway, that’s my stuck-in-an-elevator story. I can’t say I recommend the experience, but it does add an interesting extra layer to the New Yorker<\/cite> story…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Eric Kaufman, inspired by this piece in The New Yorker, relates his own tale of being stuck in an elevator: 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… Continue reading Stuck in an Elevator<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}