Lift

“Where the hell are those updated Watson files?” snarled my boss.

I physically recoiled from his voice even though he was on the other end of the phone line. In the few short months since I’d joined Apex Design Associates, the man had done nothing but terrorize me and the rest of the people in my department. The way he treated us was truly monstrous, but the old-timers said that anyone who could survive his gauntlet was on a fast-track for promotion.

“Um, I, uh, emailed them to you last night, sir,” I stammered.

“Last night?” said my boss.

“Yes, sir,” I said with a gulp. “You, um, told us to stay until we got the report done, sir. Which we did, ahem, I mean.”

“Well, there’s nothing in my inbox,” said my boss.

At that point, I truly began to panic. Had I stayed at work until 11:00 for nothing? Collating all those updated numbers and getting them to line up coherently in the report had consumed me from the moment I’d walked in yesterday morning. After all that sacrifice, had I really dropped the ball by forgetting to do the easiest part - hitting send? It didn’t seem possible, yet that’s what my boss was claiming.

“I’m, uh, sorry, sir. I can resend the report to you right away,” I said.

“Not good enough,” growled my boss. “I’ve got a presentation in front of the CEO in half an hour. I need you to print it out and deliver it to The Oval.”

“The, um, what, sir?” I said, my mind spinning. “You mean the conference room on the sixteenth floor?”

“Christ, are you deaf? Yes, of course,” roared my boss, once again making me wince. “Now step to it.”

“Right, of course, sir. Right away,” I said, sweating profusely as I set my phone down on my desk.

Although my hands were trembling, it only took a minute or so to find the file and send it to the printer. What had me shook up was that I had been summoned to the top floor of the building where only senior executives and the firm’s most prestigious clients were allowed to go.

Many of my coworkers, even some who had been working there for years, had never been up there. There were rumors that the bathrooms all had gold-plated fixtures and that they had a five-star chef on standby to prepare food, including for meetings in the conference room that was nicknamed “The Oval” for some reason.

Normally, just getting an invite to the sixteenth floor was a huge privilege and a sign that you were in favor with upper management. I didn’t think that was the case for me, though. It was more like my boss was too impatient to print out the report himself. I was just a glorified donkey being granted a glimpse of heaven because I’d apparently been too stupid to correctly send an email.

Either way, once the printer was done shooting out all the pages, I carefully placed them inside a binder and then tightly clutched that binder to my chest as I walked over to the elevator and pressed the call button. After a few minutes, the doors opened, and I stepped inside, my heart in my throat as a I leaned over and pressed the illuminated circle marked “16.”

There was a young woman riding in the elevator alongside me, but I was so keyed up that I scarcely paid any attention to her. Instead, I kept my eyes glued to the display panel at the top that showed what floor we were on. So far in my career, I’d never been above the ninth floor, so once we got to ten, I gulped. Double digits.

The number kept rising and rising, and a distant part of my mind wondered why the woman wasn’t getting off. But I had more important things to concern myself with, such as praying to all the saints in heaven that all the pages had printed out correctly. Otherwise, my boss would probably fire me on the spot for sheer incompetence, not that I would blame him.

Just as we slid past the twelfth floor, though, the elevator jolted hard, nearly causing me to lose my balance. Before I could figure out what was going on, though, I heard the audible whine of a motor, and then we came to a stop. After that, there was just silence.

I stood there for a really long moment as I waited for whatever the problem was to resolve itself so the elevator could continue on its way, but it remained motionless. There were no warning beeps or flashing lights, anything to indicate that a real emergency was going on. The elevator just wasn’t working, and I had no idea why.

I shot a quick glance over at the young woman, and she glanced over at me, and we both kind of shrugged like, “Oh well, what can you do?” Because there really was nothing to do. Elevators are supposed to just work. That’s been my experience at least. You press the button, they do their thing, and you never think twice about it.

The lights were on, so I knew we hadn’t lost power. Furthermore, the circle with “16” written on it remained illuminated, so the elevator knew where I wanted to go. It just wasn’t moving for some reason. It was one of those things that’s frustrating and baffling at the same time because you can’t possibly imagine what could’ve gone wrong for it to stop in between floors like that.

I really don’t know how long I stood there, staring at the panel as if I were expecting a revelation or something. All I know is that the situation soon became quite awkward. Normal elevator etiquette requires you to politely ignore the people in there beside you, but that only works if you’re only sharing the space with them for a few moments.

As soon as the elevator becomes a motionless box, it starts to become a farce, two people just silently staring at the wall together. But I didn’t really know what else to do. My mind was doing an endless hamster wheel loop, first expecting the elevator to jolt back into life and then worrying about all the time that was ticking by, my boss getting angrier and angrier by the second. Before I knew it, my pulse was racing, and I was finding it difficult to breathe.

“I think something’s wrong,” said the young woman, finally breaking the silence - and the tension.

“Yeah, seems so,” I quipped in response, still avoiding direct eye contact, another ground rule of elevator etiquette.

For the first time, I began to really examine the panel on the elevator. It was made out of some silver metal, presumably steel, and besides the buttons listing all the floors, there was a red knob that said “emergency stop.” Below that, there was a small perforated grill. Was that some kind of speaker system?

If so, maybe a maintenance or security person had been alerted to the fact that the elevator had stopped working and would soon be informing us that they had everything under control and to sit tight. But the speaker, if it was a speaker, remained silent.

Nonetheless, I tried to steady my nerves by imagining a control room somewhere in the building with dozens of black and white monitors and a crack team of experts all staring at a board of blinking lights, using their radios to communicate with the maintenance guys, telling them that they’d noticed the elevator was out of order and dispatching them to perform urgent repairs.

In other words, everything was fully under control, even if it did feel like we’d been abandoned. The firm I worked for had almost 700 employees in that building. Surely, two members of staff couldn’t go missing and an elevator break down without someone noticing, right? Especially not in a building the company had designed and built itself. No, that was impossible.

“Hmm,” said the young woman, jolting me out of my reverie by pulling on a little handle on the panel that I hadn’t noticed.

It turned out to be a small door, and inside was a phone handset. Instantly, a flood of relief washed over me. The brilliant engineers at Apex Design Associates had included a way for elevator passengers to communicate with the control room precisely for situations like this. Excellent!

“Hello?” said the young woman, lifting the phone handset to her ear.