Great, now I’m scared of elevators.
Last night I finished this fascinating, though quite long, New Yorker piece on elevators. You’d think elevators would be a fairly boring thing to read about but writer Nick Paumgarten does a great job making things interesting. Paumgarten also weaves in the heartbreaking tale of Nicholas White who was TRAPPED IN AN ELEVATOR FOR 41 HOURS! Here’s a time-lapse video of his ordeal
Read the whole thing if only to find out White’s story. Here’s some other bits I enjoyed:
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.
My Dad’s been saying this for years (probably since before 1990 actually) and while I never really paid attention, I guess he was right after all. Here’s my favorite part of the article:
Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.
You see that? I hate when people try to engage in “small talk” on the elevator. I don’t want to talk to you when we are off it, why would I want to talk to you when we are on?
The close button thing reminds me of an urban legend when I lived in Tucson that there were special sensors on the traffic lights, and that if you flashed your high beam at the right distance when approaching, the light would change. Supposedly this was put in so cops could get through red-lights easier when on their way to a crime or something.
Anyway, all around town I would see people flash their high beams when they came up to an intersection. Obviously sometimes the lights would change just by coincidence, reinforcing the myth of the secret sensors. When it didn’t work, people would either assume THAT intersection didn’t have a working sensor, or they just didn’t flash their lights from the right distance.
And I mean *EVERYONE* in town seemed to believe this.