Lets suppose you’re stuck in an elevator, and you use the little red phone in the corner to call for help.
Who’s gonna answer?
Probably the building superintendant.
In my office building, it connects to the company that has the maintenance contract on the elevator. They have someone staffing the call center around the clock and they have a key to our building. Presumably the service guys can be paged at any time, so if you got stuck in the elevator in the middle of the night, they should be able to get you out within an hour or so.
In larger buildings, the emergency phone might connect with the building security office, which should also be staffed all the time.
My university library had an explicit explanation on the wall beside the lifts, saying something like: “At weekends and outside opening hours, no security personnel will be availble to respond to alarms. Therefore, you use the lifts at these times at your own risk.”
At my building (large public library), the phone goes to the Security Desk. And the guy on the other end told me about 5 times to keep calm and that they would get me out.
I really wasn’t worried as I didn’t have to go to the bathroom or anything.
I was stuck for about 5 minutes.
BobT: As a long-time claustrophobic, I’d like to preface this by saying that your answer might help me establish some minimal amount of ease on my next elevator trip.
How’d you get out?
Oh, no firemen or anything. They just had some electrical problems and they restarted the elevator after resetting the equipment.
But I do understand how someone could get upset about being stuck in an elevator.
I was in a relatively large car and I was the only person in it.
I felt more claustrophobic walking through the model of SkyLab at the Air and Space Museum in DC and being caught behind a father who had to explain EVERYTHING in it to his son.
I recently found out and was slightly surprised.
Our elevator gets stuck in the middle of a work day. After about a minute someone in the elevator picks up the phone. The person on the other end of the line asks where we’re stuck. The name of our location is given. Now this is the strange part, they have no idea where that is and they want a street address. I live in a town of 20,000 people - everyone knows were this mall is. All said and done this call centre is in the states, I live in northern Canada. Very strange and not all that reassuring. They did eventually figure out our location and phone the building maintenance guy ( 10 meters away from us but thousands of km away from them) who let us out.
I like to take the stairs now.
At my place of work, the elevator phone connects to Security, which is available 24x7. Businesses that don’t have a full-time security staff can subscribe to an answering service, like the one my friend worked for. This answering service may not be in your city, but the operator supposedly knows whom to call to help you. This is probably what happened to Hecubis.
My friend worked as an operator at an elevator phone answering service for one day; she said it was the most boring job she’d ever had.
Hecubis: Most elevators here have a license with the elevator’s street location printed on it. Recently they changed the process for doing this and some places have ‘License in Machine Room’ signs. AFAIK most phones are connected to the elevator maintenance company.
The ‘Alarm’ button found in most elevators will ring a bell in the elevator shaft. This will alert people nearby that something bad is happening in the elevator, but they might not know what it is. It may also call security in some buildings. Since the button can be pressed accidentally, the bell rings only when the button is held down.
Recently the safety requirements were changed (because of the Americans with Disabilities Act, IIRC) so that newer elevators do not have ‘Stop’ buttons. Instead they have key-operated stop switches. This is so that someone does not use the Stop button to stop the elevator and assault someone in the elevator (and presumably so that less malicious but still mischievous things can’t be done in elevators). I can think of very few legitimate situations where the Stop button might be useful, especially because it stops the elevator in the shaft with the doors closed.
I got stuck in the elevator for almost fifteen minutes last week. The phone rang the receptiondrone at the building management company. She then had to page the maintenance people.
No idea what would have happened if it had been after hours.
Sounds like the answer to the GQ is “whoever the phone is programmed to call, or not call, depending on how much the owners do or don’t suck.” 