Elevator Blues

About a week ago, I came across a fascinating New Yorker article on elevators (via kottke.org). Framing the article and interspersed throughout is the account of Nicholas White, an office worker who was trapped in a stuck elevator for 41 hours.

41 hours. Think about that for a second. That's almost two whole days in a space smaller than most jail cells, with no food, water, bed, or toilet.

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. [...] He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

White's ordeal was captured on a security camera. Watching the timelapse video is quite discomfiting, primarily because White looks like a bug trapped in a glass box frantically beating its body against the walls, but also because I start to imagine what White must have gone through -- panic, boredom, futility, and despair.


The story doesn't end well.

Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another.

The rest of the article does a good job of delivering details on what is seemingly not a rich topic. I was glad to see that the article mentioned a key fact about elevators and skyscrapers that I learned in a Humanities course in college:

Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war.

I also found the concept of "elevatoring" a building--designing the entire elevator system based on predictions of how many people will use them and in what patterns--very interesting. People have a maximum elevator wait time they're willing to endure. Any more and frustration sets in. Elevatoring is an inexact science but you know when you've got it wrong.

And this tied nicely into an article I'd read about bottom-up game design by Ernest W. Adams, where he talked about SimTower. Ostensibly a skyscraper "software toy" in the same vein as SimCity, the fundamental gameplay mechanic of SimTower was really elevator simulation. Elevatoring a building is a great problem to approximate and simulate on a computer but it doesn't necessarily translate into fun gameplay.

As a coda of weird synergy, two days ago the elevator in our building got stuck between floors. They're going to install a 24-hour support phone shortly.