I read this as “I drew on my ‘Old Navy’ training” and thought “Good Og! What are they doing in retail these days?”
I think I need a vacation.
I’ll ignore the typo and describe my weirdest elevator experience, which in truth wasn’t really that weird.
I was in the elevator of our condo with my little brother and sister; I was maybe 14 so they were 6 and 8 respectively. As we got in we saw an Igloo cooler in the middle of the floor but the car was otherwise empty. I opened it and saw a couple bricks of marijuana, a couple bongs, a Hustler magazine, a couple beers and a big ice pack. My siblings were too young to know what they were looking at. By the time I finished taking stock we reached the ground floor, I closed the cooler, picked it up, the doors opened, and there’s a guy standing there looking panicked. He saw me holding the cooler and stuck his hand out while the look on his face said “don’t fuck with me, kid”. I handed it over.
That guy must have had quite a party planned.
What was weird wasn’t the “elevator” part, really…
I was staying at a Youth Hostel in NYC, which happened to be two floors at the YMCA. One lift was broken. The other one gets there and about 8 of us pile in, with me at the buttons asking “what floor”. Mostly guests, with a guy in blue overalls.
The lift stopped: cusswords ensued. Or rather, I should say malas palabras. They were all in Spanish! The overalled guy was the lift tech, a Costa Rican who was being sworn in as a citizen the next day; the rest of us all lived in or were from Barcelona. After having a healthy laugh about it, congratulating the tech on his upcoming new citizenship and asking him whether there were other mates of his that could get us out if it didn’t stop moving again, it did restart by itself. Whew!
The lift at Mom’s is just… personable. The fourth floor door breaks down often: some contact doesn’t notice it’s actually making contact, so the lift just sits there, with the security door stuck open and doesn’t respond to calls from other floors or to people inside puching the buttons. We blame this on a neighbor who has been known to keep that poor door open for over 20 minutes - she tries it with the bottom floor door too, but the bottom floor gets enough traffic that someone else will eventually grab her hand, take it off the door’s handle and close the door, informing her that “you’re not in your living room, you know.”
At the 7th floor, it sometimes stops about 8" below the actual floor level and doesn’t open the doors or move.
At the 5th floor, it sometimes stops about 4" above the actual floor level, but here the doors do open and it continues working normally.
Nava - sounds like your mother’s elevator is related to the one in our old building!
Sometimes, it would do exactly what it was told. Other times, it would skip floors requested and go all the way to the top, then to the basement, open on the ground floor and sit there. Requesting the floor again might get you home, or it will just repeat the same thing. Or it will get confused and display “5” but actually open on 4 or 6. So either you get out and walk down or up the stairs to get to your floor, or you send it back down to the basement and try again. Sometimes, if you call if from the ground floor, and it’s on a higher level, it will go to the basement, then go back up and stop on different floors (I assume people got on in the basement from the underground parking lot) without ever opening on the ground floor. Once it starts doing that, it’s nearly impossible to call it - the only thing I’ve seen work is if someone from another floor gets on and requests “1” (ground floor). At least there are 2 elevators in the building, and the other one doesn’t do this, but occasionally (about 30% of the time) it breaks down for other reasons. The misbehaving elevator is, of course, the service elevator, so we spent a lot of time travelling up and down to random floors while trying to move out!
I don’t miss those elevators!
Quite some time ago I was in a small elevator in England that decided to stop between floors. Pressing various buttons had no effect. There was no “Alarm” button. There was, however, a nice little door labeled “Telephone,” apparently intended for just this sort of occasion.
I opened it, but found no phone inside, nor any indication (e.g. wires, a handset cradle) that there ever had been one. Instead, there was a neatly mounted sign saying “In case of difficulty, ring 123-45-678.” That’s it.
Just how you were supposed to ring anyone was not addressed (this was long before cellphones). While I pondered this problem, the elevator began to move. I never discovered any explanation for this 3-minute loss of service.
For a while, I worked 2nd shift in the office building of a factory. I could have walked up to the second floor, but dragging my cleaning gear and trash cans up the stairs was right out. The elevator was cranky, and it would try to hurt you on the second floor. The door would start to close, and if you obstructed it, the safety switch would back it up about 6 inches, then hit you again. I’d be trying to extract myself, my cart full of gear, and two big, wheeled trash cans, and the door would be looping, ka-pang, ka-pang, ka-pang. One night, I left my cart there in the threshold while I emptied 80 wastebaskets. I came back with my full cans, and it was still cycling, ka-pang, ka-pang, ka-pang.
When I was an intern once I was trying to get out of the hospital on a Sunday afternoon before a holiday Monday… I was running some blood down to the lab when the elevator stopped. I was there with a patient’s husband. We picked up the emergency phone but it wasn’t working. We finally decided to hit the alarm button. The problem was that this was a transport elevator and people were always pushing the hold button to get stretchers off and on, so it was common to hear the alarm ring for 5-10 minutes several times a day. Anyway, we sat there listening to the alarm for 45 minutes before anybody realized that we hadn’t deliberately stopped it to transport a patient. Meanwhile, I kept getting paged for the lab results for the blood in my pocket. Finally, somebody figured it out and rescued us.
Weird elevator story #1: I had worked late and was the only person to get on the elevator on my floor, the 11th. I got on, pushed the 0 button (or L, or whatever), and stood there stupidly. The elevator starting going down. A VOICE said, “Hey, could you push seven for me?”
I was the only person on the elevator. I looked up, couldn’t see anything. It’s like the voice of god. I looked over my shoulder, then up again.
VOICE: Yeah, I’m up here, I’m working on the elevator. Could you push 7?
So I pushed 7 and when the elevator stopped there I heard a noise on top (first thing I’d heard, other than the VOICE), and the VOICE said, “Thanks.”
Weird elevator story #2: I used to work at a building that had double-decker elevators (Republic Plaza in Denver). When you got on the elevator to go down, sometimes you ended up in the lobby and sometimes you ended up in the concourse, 1 floor down. So, I’m leaving work (this time from the 47th floor), running toward a totally full elevator which maybe I can get on if I hit the button in time. otherwise I could have to wait for several minutes. I hit the button. The 20 or so people on the elevator look at me speculatively: Will I make it? Am I going to delay them?
The doors close; I didn’t make it.
Then they open; I did make it.
But they open on a completely empty elevator where before there were lots of people. Like magic.
Yeah, that was the weirdest. Even though I knew that what happened was I missed the bottom deck and got the top deck, still it was odd that it was completely empty. And it was literally like all the folks on the elevator had disappeared. Too bad there was no one there to see the shocked expression on my face.
Weird elevator story #3: Okay, not that weird. I once worked for Marvin Davis’s company. He was a big fat rich guy who made a fortune in oil and then bought a movie studio and moved to Hollywood, but at this time, many years ago, he was still in Denver. Anyway, I got on the elevator with Marvin, and trust me when I say that once Marvin is on the elevator there is not a lot of room for anyone else. So a couple of other people who were waiting for the elevator decided to take the next one. And trust me when I say he was one of the most flatulent people I have ever, uh, been on an elevator with, and also quite sexist. Think Jabba the Hut, who had to have been modeled after him. He was going to the top. I was going a couple of floors below that, but I decided to get off earlier and take another elevator, and about three days later I got fired.
Funny elevator story: A guy on the elevator is flirting with a girl on the elevator, and she’s flirting back. In order to flirt more successfully he has turned to face her. In so doing he somehow hits the alarm button with his butt. The elevator stops with a lurch and seconds later a voice comes over the speaker: “Everything all right in there?”
The guy says, kinda sheepish, “Yeah, sorry, hit it by mistake…”
And the girl SCREAMS! Very convincingly.
Very amusing to the other 5 or 6 of us who were on there. The guy gets real red and kind of sweaty then eventually he laughs along with everybody else.
Security was waiting on the ground floor. Guns drawn.