I got stuck in a elevator on my way back from lunch two days ago. This is not an uncommon occurrence in our building–about 1/3 of our company has gotten stuck at one time or another. However, it’s a bit awakening when it happens to you.

The elevator made a very sudden stop on going up from the 1st floor lobby to the 28th floor, sudden enough enough to give a moment of weightlessness. Fortunately I happened to be with my boss/good friend from work and it was just us. And fortunately we’d just come back from grabbing lunch, so starving to death wasn’t a worry of ours. We pushed the alarm button which just rings a loud bell attached to the elevator car. Nothing happened.

As I mentioned, other coworkers had also been stuck in one of 6 elevators for our floor, one time on our floor with the doors 7/8 closed–just enough to see in, but not enough to get out. When this happened, I thought I should try to be the hero and open the doors, after all, the doors were already cracked open, there were 5 very uncomfortable looking people in the elevator, and the primary function of doors in general is to open and close, so really why not try to open them? Well, another coworker watching the spectacle said, “No no, it’s a liability, building maintenance (or the fire department) will eventually come.” Maintenance did come, 20 minutes later, and opened the already open doors.

However, when you’re the one in an elevator, liability isn’t really a concern–getting out of the elevator is the main concern. So I’m thinking, this is bs, we shouldn’t be stuck in this stupid elevator. Time to give liability the upward fist. I push on the inner elevator car doors and they slooowwwly and heavily slide open and lock in place. We’re half a floor above the 18th floor. This is fortunate as our elevators only services floors 18-35. If we’d gotten stuck at floor 9.5, we’d be shit out of luck. I found the cam on the inner elevator doors to release and open the door. It slides open. Hmm, it’s a 5 foot jump down into the 18th floor elevator lobby. We contemplate worst case scenarios (edge cases as they’re called in our industry) — The elevator comes back to life and shoots upward as one of us is crawling out slicing the person in half at the waist. Or worse, the elevator decides to plunge 18 stories to the 1st floor with the same outcome as the previous case.

We decided that both of these cases are highly unlikely but just to be safe, we should exit quickly as opposed to leisurely straddling the guillotine of separation. I throw my pint of steamed white rice down into the elevator lobby and jump out. My boss follows with his combo #17 (fried founder sandwich on a wheat kaiser roll with fries). I push the up elevator button in the lobby like nothing had happened, we take a functional elevator to our floor, sit down and eat our lunches.

So, a little bit of mid-day adventure…things definitely could have been worse.