On Saturday I boarded an elevator with my dad, destined for the third floor of the five floor building. This wasn’t the typical pushbutton type elevator that is typically used by you modern folk. Nope…no way. This elevator was almost completely manually controlled with cranks and levers. This was the type of elevator that required a skilled elevator man. This was the type of elevator that was way too complicated for normal people like my father and me.
Although it may seem like this elevator was a 9’x 4’ death canister, it had one huge advantage over modern elevators—-a variable speed regulator. This means that if I want to go from the basement to the fifth floor going 55mph, there’s nothing, except common sense, that can stop me from doing so.
This day was your typical boring Saturday afternoon, so to add some excitement to our day, we discarded all measures of common sense and we set the lever to 11,000 jiggawatts of power, also known as “THE DANGER ZONE.” For exactly one split second, we were headed to the third floor at a speed that my 175 horsepower Nissan Altima could only achieve when strapped to the roof of a Dodge Viper, but then we stopped and the crank no longer worked.
Now would be a good time to say “UH-OH!”
Since this wasn’t your typical elevator, we were able to open the door and assess the situation. We were stuck between the first and second floor, but there was a 1 foot space to try to climb out of the elevator. My dad and I slid out with no problem (thank God I hadn’t eaten that second chocolate éclair) and we had to take the steps up to the roof to flip a gigantic switch that looked like it belonged to an electric chair in order to make the elevator functional again.
In the end, we had to do a lot more work to get to the third floor, but was it worth it? MOST DEFINITELY! I give that elevator my seal of approval and I hope to have many more exciting life-threatening experiences with it.