I just spent an hour and a half in an elevator near the third floor of a building after almost everyone had gone home. My personal phone was down two floors charging up, there was nobody to hear the alarm bell and the red emergency phone kept getting a busy signal. Finally, someone heard me yelling and called the fire department. Little ventilation, no fan that I noticed…and do you know how many movies have scenes where bad things happen to people? I think I have seen them all. 
So, tell me your tales of going nowhere fast.
Oh man! Glad you got out ok.
Did you have to pee? Did you try to escape? Pull doors open, hatch, anything?
No.
Yes.
No hatch that I could find.
Wow, what a horrible experience! I have no such experience to relate, but I came in to say that this is why I hate, hate, hate elevators. I’ve taken stairs up multiple storeys to avoid the cursed things.
The only thing worse than your elevator experience is being stuck in an elevator that is crammed with people jammed together like sardines in a tin can.
I reserve a special paranoia for “express” elevators in tall buildings – these things run in concrete shafts that can go hundreds of feet between floors and no hope of egress in between.
As for your cell phone, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t work inside an elevator anyway, which is essentially a steel cage in a concrete shaft.
Me too. I would’ve committed suicide. I swear.
Either that or imploded. I could not handle 10min. of that. I freak out in the shower some times.
I’m so happy you’re ok @Czarcasm .
Keep that phone on you.
And you were alone. Gahhh!
I remember one time being stuck between floors on an escalator. 
Seriously, I’ll address this:
I don’t mind elevators, but I do remember living on the sixth floor of a highrise. Sometimes, the stairs were the best way to go. Down was easy, of course, but up was a great way to get some exercise and stay in shape. Then, I moved to a third-storey walkup, and I had no choice but the stairs.
At my age, I tend to reconsider stairs nowadays, unless it is only one or two floors up. But like I said, down is still easy from higher floors, and a bit of exercise besides.
Oh that is bad. What did your family and friends think when you told them? My roommates each read the thread and said “Sorry dude.” They had no further measures.
Each AI bot I asked said the same thing. Their algorithms can’t handle that account.
In the 80’s the company I worked for was moving to a new building. I went with a colleague to check it out, we were working nearby. The whole building was empty because workers were still busy finishing. We got stuck in an elevator and because nobody was working there it took a lot of time before some builders found us. The most horrible thing is that an alarm was going off because the elevator was stuck to warn people and that noise was LOUD and continuous all the time till the door could be opened. Oh man.
Glad it’s over and you’re okay.
That’s inexcusable. I can think of only one reason to have an emergency phone in an elevator, and this was it. If it doesn’t work the one time it’s needed, why even have the damn thing? I don’t know if you have any way to get issues addressed by the building management, but this needs to be corrected.
On a business trip, riding light rail from jobsite back to hotel after dark. Train stopped in a seriously sketchy area, opened all the doors, and just sat there for a long time. While we grimly watched the denizens of the area get more and more interested, and finally begin moving through the cars harassing the riders (aggressive and threatening panhandling). Eventually the train made some sort of alarm that it was about to move, and the locals scampered away before the doors re-closed. This wasn’t their first rodeo, as they were aware of the departure signals.
Of course I have my tales of woe regarding airline travel, with inexplicable gate/plane changes, cancellations, and getting stuck places I don’t want to be – but these occur inside the safety of airport terminals and aren’t as nerve-wracking.
But I’ve never gotten stuck on an elevator, thankfully. Glad you got rescued (relatively) quickly.
I think that most of the rooms I’ve been stuck in wouldn’t move…
I think that, after 15 minutes or so of busy signal on the emergency button, I’d have tried to pry the doors open and hope that there was a floor close enough I could get out to.
One summer, as a teen, I rode my bike to the local college I was going to attend in September. Just to get a feel to get around the place, as it was (and still is) an old-ish building with several wings added over the decades, floors that don’t quite line up and confusing room numbers. I ended up in one of the (empty) dorm pavilions. Went down the stairs at the end of the corridor… and found out all the doors were locked and I was trapped in the stairwell. No cell phone in the 1980s, and no employees had any reason to wander into the dorms, 2 weeks before courses resumed. I panicked for a few minutes before I found that the door on the ground floor was just stuck and took some effort to open.
Over the years, it has often been my responsibility to provide for the emergency telephone service in elevators. I have been in many meetings where the client is doing some sort of leasehold reduction or simply putting a building into mothballs. One of the first things that would come up was removing all data and telephone services from the building. The bean counters would plan on calling up the carrier or service provider and just canceling everything.
The problem is, of course, that if the elevator emergency telephone(s) is disconnected, the elevator permit has to be canceled and the elevator has to be taken out of service. That doesn’t seem too bad. Buuuttt…when someone goes to get the elevator permitted again, even if it’s only a couple months later, the elevator now has to meet all current elevator requirements. This can be might difficult if the building is 30 or 40 years old. I’ve seen clients have to pay over $50K to get a single elevator bank back into service later in the same year. Would have been a lot cheaper to keep a couple phone lines in service.
The hatch isn’t designed or meant to be opened from the inside of the elevator, it’s generally only accessible from the roof of the car, and is locked from that side.
Stuck on an airplane that wouldn’t leave the gate. Six hours in a plane with four kids and we were not allowed to deplane. All because of a cargo door that wouldn’t latch. They finally gave up and let us off, by which time we had missed our connecting flight, so had to stand in an interminable line in Denver to get a local hotel room (kids by now delirious with fatigue). The hotel room stank of stale cigarettes and one of the kids had to sleep in a chair because the hotel didn’t have enough temp beds.
Some embassies in the world are in very old buildings, particularly in the former Soviet countries, and the elevators are ancient creaking things with those accordion metal doors. I was on a job at one of those, and the elevator had a sign that clearly said “No More Than Four People In This Elevator”. So I’m riding up with three other people, and the thing is creaking and groaning, but at least moving, then stops at a floor and there is someone waiting. She forces her way in, despite my pointing out the sign, and we start to rise. Dead stop. I know that someone will come along and get us out eventually, but I thought “why not have a little fun with the idiot that caused this”. Someone made a joke right then about hoping nobody is claustrophobic, so I said, with a quaver in my voice, “I was trapped in a cage in Vietnam and I’m feeling a bit shaky right now”, whilst staring wide-eyed at the woman who caused this to happen. I didn’t think it was possible for people to move away from me in that tight space, but somehow they managed.
Damn it, the movies lied to me again!! 
I’ve seen hatches on the ceilings of some elevators, but often this is too high for one person to reach. So do they expect that someone is going to stand on someone else’s shoulders to reach it? And actually I remember reading that those hatches aren’t really meant for someone to escape an elevator.
They’re not. It’s service access. Maintenance climbs down to it from a higher floor. The hatch is there so they don’t have to climb back out the same way. There’s nowhere to escape from up there, anyways. Even if you could climb up there, you’d most likely just fall down the shaft and die. The next floor would be higher above you than you could reach, and the doors often can’t be forced open without the car properly aligned. There are gaps all around the car, not to mention cables and counterweights and machinery.
Years ago, before I started here, the evening cleaning crew was wrapping things up in preparation for departure at 11 pm. One man was taking the elevator back down to the first floor so that he could go to maintenance office, gather his stuff, and leave. The elevator broke down and, because it had no emergency phone or escape hatch, and because his phone was on his desk instead of in his pocket, he ended up stuck on the elevator the entire night until the first morning guy arrived at 6 am.
In a cosmic coincidence, workers just finished a massive rehab of our sorry elevator. It now has a phone, and they somehow set it up so that, if it fails, you can push a button, and a separate system brings it down to the first floor, opens the door, and shuts it completely down.