Have You Ever Driven a "Real" Elevator?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

As part of my quest to end my unemployment, I now took a second part time job. This is only 1 day a week, and I get to, of all things, drive an elevator.

It is in a very upscale, exculsive club, for very wealthy people.

My job consists of driving the elevator for 8 to ten hours one day a week.

The pay is minimum which, is fair, I guess, as it’s not brain surgery.

I never had seen an actual old fashioned elevator. I wait outside, on the ground floor, (a place like this would never have a first floor, it’s a GROUND floor, with the first floor above that).

Then the occupant steps in and tells you what section he wants. baths, auditorium, pook area, billiards/sports room, banquet halls, sleeping accommodations, etc

Then I step on a button on the floor, which allows me to close the outside door, (this prevents people from walking into an empty shaft, where the elevator is on another floor). You still have to close the outside door manually but the button releases the catch.

Then I close the inside door, which allows the elevator to run.

Then I use a lever. I push forward to go down and pull the lever backward to go up, which for some reason seems backward to me. Then I have to count the floors as I go up (up to 17).

The trick is you have to get the elevator within one inch of the floor’s exit, in order for the inside door to open. This is hard to do as you pull back and forth on the lever to control the speed and if you don’t get it exact, there are special buttons that allow you to move the elevator up and down about 1 inch at a time.

But don’t try doing that when it’s full of people, who are impatient. Those buttons also allow the elevator to run even if either the outside door or inside door is open.

I got a days practice, man I was throwing people everywhere with jerky stopping and starting motions. It was harder to learn than a stick shift.

And it’s hard to do as the floors are barely labled. So you have to keep your eyes focused as you go up, so you know where you are.

And the call buzzer is odd. If you’re on the main floor and someone on floor 15 wants you, they push a buzzer and somehow a slot next to the floor number becomes white. That’s the floor to go to. That doesn’t seem electrical, I don’t know how that exactly is done.

I never realized how lucky we have it today. Just push the button and wait. The job by the way is REALLY boring, but it beats being evicted. LOL

2

That’s kind of a cool kind of job to have had in your past. Some day you’ll be in a bar talking to your friends about weird jobs you had when you were younger and you’ll win that conversation. Do you wear a uniform?

I remember being little and riding in an elevator with an operator in a building at the Smithsonian in DC and thinking it was so cool, like something in a movie.

3

I use to work in a furniture store that had a three-storey warehouse with a real elevator. It was a freight elevator, for moving furniture. It was manually operated; there was a rope at the back of the elevator leading up over a big pulley and flywheel at the top of the shaft. To go up, you pulled down on the rope and the elevator went up, slowly. To come down, you released the brake, and the elevator came down, slowly at first, but faster and faster if you didn’t touch the brake on the way down.

That’s a real elevator.

4

I have, but only in the sense that I was with my folks at some old-school hotel in D.C., and the elevator driver thought it would be funny to teach me how. For a ten-year-old, it was damn hard, and I nearly made my mom ill by jerking the car up and down for what felt like hours. At the time, I thought the operator was SOOOO ANCIENT that he had probably been installed with the elevator itself, but now that I think back on it, he was probably only seventy or so.

Good times.

5

When I was about 12 years old, my doctor worked in an old building that had an elevator and elevator operator that was just how you described. He noticed how interested I was, so one day he allowed me to operate the control while I rode it all the way up and down once.

This was around 1974 or so.

6

Now we’re complete. Whenever anyone wanders by, asking about if there are still any manual elevators left, we can say yes, and not only that, but one of our members here is an actual elevator operator!

7

Do you mean to say that human muscle power was the actual prime mover for the device? That’s all kind of cool. And also all kinds of slow and tiring, of course.

8

I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought of that. SDMB was missing a job. We should resurrect **Twickster’s ** job thread…

-D/a

9

That was my summer job when I was in college in the late 60s/early 70s. I was the vacation relief guy in various big apartment buildings on Park Avenue and other places on New York’s Upper East Side. I worked at various times as a doorman and as an elevator operator, for both the front elevator (that the tenants used) and the service elevator (that the help and deliverymen used). In most buildings I operated a manual elevator a lot like the one described, with a manual switch you moved to make the elevator go up and down. It took some skill to get the elevator exactly level with the floor. (And with the more obnoxious tenants, sometimes I never quite managed to get it level enough so they didn’t trip as they went out. ;)) We also had the kind of floor indicators mentioned by the OP, with white flags.

In the last building I worked in though, it was an automatic elevator where I just pushed the buttons. The tenant could have done it just as easily, but I was there for show.

When I was doorman/front man I wore a gray uniform with white gloves and a stripe down the side of the leg. When I operated the back cars, I wore a blue uniform.

10

Pook area? They were right, the wealthy are different from you and me.

11

Awesome job. Most operators I met were totally chill people, and it seems like they really knew their shit – i.e., stopping just on a dime at the right floor.

12

Yes, I have to wear a uniform, but I don’t get to wear the stereotypical hat

That’s a typo it should be pool area.

I’m getting better at it. The real bad part of the job, I realized working last night. You become the enforcer. The club has a dress code. Ladies must wear skirts or dresses, men must wear coats and ties, in all public areas. Children are not allowed anywhere, except the ground floor, basement (they have a bowling alley down there) or the floor where the pool is.

And the pool is restricted. Like families till noon. Ladies only from noon to 3pm and gentlemen after 3pm.

And then the ladies baths take up a floor and the men can’t go on that floor and the men’s baths have a different floor so the women can’t go there.

For some reason the women are always like, "My husband is in there (the men’s bath), I just need to talk to him for a second. And I am not allowed to even stop the elevator at that floor. I have to take a message.

The members get a bit miffed when they come in a jacket and tie, change to work out and then have to change back into a jacket and tie, to leave.

I spoke the the GM and he told me, the members are just trying to pull this over on me, as I’m new. He said, “It’s a private club and the members themseleves overwhelmingly voted to keep the dress code. And they can vote to change it anytime they want.”

I can see why, I worked till 1am and they had a very expensive wedding, the catering manager said, it was close to 100 grand and you really can’t have 200 guests, for a wedding and have other memebers running past without being dressed right.

The other cool thing they have is real phone booths. Cell phones are not allowed to be used in the club, so if someone gets a cell call they are instructed to go into the phone booth and take it. I can’t remember the last time I saw a real phone booth. You know made of wood and and closes shut.

The doormen is a much better job. Evidently they get tipped. One of the doorman said, he used to drive the elevator and they don’t get tipped. Well you can get a tip, but no one ever does. But the doormen apparently do all right in tips.

That said, I am getting better, but it does make you realize how much computers and automation has eliminated jobs. And how even simple things, or seemingly simple things, can be difficult.

I would compare driving this elevator to driving a stick shift.

13

That’s really bizarre.

So… is doorman something you have to work up to?

14

I think it is. I haven’t been there long, and now that I’m done training I’m only gonna work one day a week, so yeah I think it is.

The thing is, in a club like this, it’s full of very wealthy people. These some of Chicago’s big money.

And the thing is, you make minimum wage at the jobs so you need tips. The banquet staff get tips, but they are only there when there are functions. So if you’re at a function and it runs from 9am - 11am your shift is only four hours.

The resturaunt and bars are all charges to your member number, so there’s really no cash changings hands. And people get sent home if the members aren’t in it. Or the manager will just see a few people shooting pool, send the bartender home and fix the drinks himself

But the doorman are the only ones guaranteed eight hours a day. So they make a base salary and someone has to be at the door 24 hours a day. They call cabs and take packages, deliver messages so it seems to me, they are the ones doing the “extra” for the members. So they are likely to get the tips. And tipped well. The longer you’re in the club, the greater chance for a tip

Also the doorman are likely to know everyone personally as you have to see the doorman to get in, as it’s members only. I drive the elevator and I mentioned that some floors are restricted, but you could get by that by using the back stairs, if you wanted to climb down or up.

So a doorman will see everyone, where the bartender or resturant server may never see members who don’t eat at the club.

15

Good luck! I’m sure you’ll get it down. Sucks about having deal with a bunch of entitled yuppie assholes giving you static when you’re just doing your job, but at least you can have some fun trying to make them vomit whilst racing up to floor 17 or something!

16

For those who watch Project Runway**, the building in which Mood Fabrics is located has one of those elevators. It’s fine going up, but for some reason is really slow going down, so I when I go to Mood I only take it up then walk down the stairs to exit.

17

When I was about 10 or 11, I was a gofer at a Vacation Bible School season in an old, old church. That is, I helped move materials around, and got the snacks ready, and stuff like that. This old, old church had an old, old elevator, which was a manual elevator. So I learned to run it. About the hardest part about it was trying to get the floor of the elevator to match the floor of the story, which was important if I had to push a cart of snacks in and out of the elevator. But even that wasn’t too hard.

18

I’ve operated both passenger and freight elevators; I wouldn’t care to do it again.

19

If these club patrons were so damn wealthy, you think they’d splurge to install a modern elevator. Sheesh.

20

I love this thread. I’m an architect and happen to be working on lot’s of accessibility projects and of course elevators are key. What a different world now.