Elevator Action

We have new elevators at work.

They were a long time coming. Because one of the main access rooms for the elevator equipment is on the floor where i work, the building sent out a notice saying, “yeah, we’re gonna be working on the elevators for a while so you’re gonna hear a lot of banging and crashing and thumping but we’ll try to have it over relatively early…but that’s gonna be your life for the next eighteen months, so get used to it.”

(What was great was they actually said, “it’s going to take us three months per elevator” and then left it at that and we were the ones who went, “wait, there are six elevators…)

So they’re finally up and working, finally finally. I don’t know how popular this type of elevator system is now but I encountered it for the first time when I was back in New York in March: you swipe your building card against one of the lobby readers, and then you pick which of your office’s floors you’re going to, and it tells you the letter of the elevator car you’re taking. The letter illuminates when the car gets to the lobby; you get in; you got to your floor. Apart from the door open and close buttons and the “uh-oh, emergency” button, that’s it. No more other floor buttons on the elevator—you go where told the elevator you’re going to, and that’s it.

I’ve been an office drone for a long, long time. In fact, though I’ve worked at my law firm for (sharp inhalation) thirty years, I actually worked for another two years at a different law firm in the same building. So it’s been me riding these elevators for a long time.

You think about them, elevators. Or at least I do? On the old system, I figured out that if the elevator stopped on your floor on its way down, it dinged twice. And when it was going up, it dinged once. When me and another person were going in different directions, I could look clever by walking onto the elevator I needed without looking up from my phone or my book forever.

And there’s something about elevators that used to be like church for me. You know? It’s this liminal space where strangers gather to pray they don’t die. Of course, you get the excited people talking too, but a lot of times (especially in the morning) it’s just quiet. There’s a hush.

These new elevators have less God in them, I think. You swipe your card, you pick your floor, and that’s it: predestination. You know that thing where the elevator doors are closing and someone comes right at them and you have that choice to either hold the door or pretend you don’t see them? That doesn’t happen with these elevators because there’s no rushing to jump on whatever elevator is going up from the lobby. If you don’t key in, you can’t go anywhere.

And so there’s no quandary anymore. No test of your moral fiber.

Not quite sure how it worked out, but the other day I carded in for my floor, and there were a bunch of people who came to the lobby and carded in, and three of them got on one elevator, and four of them got on another, and then mine showed up last and I got on it all alone.

Back in the old days of just a few months ago, we would’ve all pressed on together, all eight of us in one car, probably.

And that’s, you know, how you used to meet new people? I mean, not often, not hardly. But, you know, it did happen. You get on the elevator with the same person going down, and then twenty minutes later, you jump into the elevator going back up, and there that person is holding an entirely different lunch from the one you’re holding.

And mischief—maybe only in the smallest sense of the word possible, but have you ever been pissed at something, maybe at nothing, and you get off the elevator but before you do, you hit the buttons on every floor going up?

Did you ever do the bike messenger trick of getting off on the next to last floor to drop something off ,so you send the elevator to the top floor so it’s the same car you rode up in? (I saw bike messengers do this trick and then I saw a few minutes of that Kevin Bacon bike messenger movie where he does the trick, and I went, “well, that’s real.”)

Did you ever get on the elevator going in the wrong direction—usually up when you were trying to go down—and hit the button for the nearest floor so you could get off and catch the next car heading down? You’re standing in the lobby of someone else’s life; you can hear the office sounds of this place you don’t work, so similar and yet so different.

That’s all gone now. Now the computer decides, and we shuttle up in silence, alone. There are no mistakes, there are no strangers, there is no mischief. The elevators require less maintenance, it’s harder for grifters and thieves to get on your floor.

It’s efficient. And it makes me a little sad every time?

-Jeff