Missing donuts in grad school sound terrible. Also, it wouldn’t surprise me if all most of them had to eat since the last symposia was ramen or beans. I’d run for donuts too.
Did you make the guy who jumped buy donuts for the whole lot of you?
Yeah, I spoke too soon upthread. Reading more about the pros and cons of hydraulic elevators, I realized that I’ve been seeing/using them in some Marriott-branded hotels for a while now, generally more recently-built ones that are three to four stories tall. Low speed, harsh starts/stops, and noise are the features that jarred my memory.
That’s where I’ve seen the hydraulic elevators going back more than 30 years. And in both hotels the elevators stopped working properly during my stays. I don’t remember what happened when they went up, which they did somehow, but they would be in slow mode on the way down, I assume bleeding out through a safety device and taking as much as 1 minute per floor.
Good friend’s dad when I was growing up had an elevator company. He got called out frequently. Company policy was that when you got the car moving, you were on TOP of the car so the pissed-off drunk who got it stuck by doing stupid things like jumping didn’t come charging out and punch you. No points for guessing where that policy came from.
I’m also reminded of an interview with an elevator guy commenting on elevator safety. He said something like, “With all the modern safeguards, there should be no way to get injured by an elevator. But it happens every ****ing day.”
So yeah, don’t jump in elevators. I’m not paranoid about it, but when I’m in a hurry and it’s only a floor or three, I avoid them simply because I figure that’ll be the time it gets me stuck. Plus if it’s only a floor or three I’m usually in a smaller building, where I’m less confident that the maintenance is serious–in a 100-story tower, they need to be serious or they’ll break constantly.
I once turned down a job offer, then the person making the offer asked me to come see what my office would be if I took the job. Turns out this three story building had a mistake made in the original plans. There was an elevator elsewhere, but “my office” was the original location that had to be scraped. So my office, while small, had a Sistine Chapel-like ceiling waaaay up there.
I was tempted.
@Sunny_Daze, that mom guilt is all too familiar, and often enough the kids hardly remember whatever we did. Many times I heard my aunt say that she felt very guilty that she’d let my uncle drag my hippie cousin to the barber and cut his hair short, back in 1970. When I asked my cousin if he remembered feeling bad about it, he just laughed and said he’d practically forgotten it.
About elevator jumping, I don’t remember ever wanting to do it, and not for lack of exposure to elevators–from ages 3 to 9, and then again for 6 years as an adult I lived in elevator buildings in big cities. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone jump in an elevator either.
Wondering if I’d just been missing out on a cultural phenomenon, I asked about it in the Polls only thread, and it seems that the majority of respondents haven’t seen it or done it. Of course, so far there are only 38 replies, but at least it shows me that I’m far from the only person who doesn’t jump in elevators and hasn’t seen others do it either.
The current poll results:
61% I have not jumped up and down in an elevator and I have not seen any other passenger jumping
18% I have jumped up and down in an elevator and I have seen at least one other passenger jumping
16% I have jumped up and down in an elevator but I have not seen any other passenger jumping
5% I have not jumped up and down in an elevator but I have seen at least one other passenger jumping
Thank you for sharing that. 
In the early 80’s, my brother came up to visit me at college.
He, my then girlfriend, and I were in the elevator of one of the buildings on campus.
And we all mused/thought/knew how cool it would be to jump up and down.
So we did … once or twice … and not in unison, IIRC.
And the elevator stopped between floors.
And it was Easter Sunday.
And the elevator repairman that we got through the emergency phone told us that he’d get to us “as soon as he felt like it.”
Which was hours later.
And the mere presence of my brother – love him like a brother, though I do – prevented the authoring of a really epic “Dear Penthouse…” letter from happening.
So … for my money … that was ‘one and done.’ I’ll find another way to scratch that adrenaline itch.
I don’t think you grasped the objective of jumping in an elevator. Random jumping up and down doesn’t do anything. The whole objective is to jump up at precisely the moment when the elevator begins to move down, producing a prolonged hang time and the sensation of weightlessness. This effect is most pronounced in an express elevator in a very tall building, because they accelerate downward at a higher rate of speed.
This.
Similarly, the intro to Deadliest Catch used to show a clip in which a crab boat was fishing on really rough seas. The deckhands had some time to kill, so with the camera watching, they all jumped up just as the deck of the boat was accelerating downward after cresting a wave; the hang time was really impressive.
It isn’t that so much. We may have done it exactly as you describe. I simply don’t recall.
Because the takeaway – being stuck in a hot elevator for hours on an Easter Sunday – was far more memorable 