The Elevators From Hell

For the most part, I’m loving my recent job change. My new office is cozy, the techies on my floor are fun and friendly types to be around, and my new work itself is challenging and interesting.

But I gotta tell you, the elevators freak me the hell out.

I’m not much of an elevator person anyway. But my new workplace is several stories up in a very tall office building, the stairwells are always hot and muggy, and I’m lazy. So every time I arrive at work, go to a meeting in another building, or go grab lunch or a coffee, I brave the elevators.

And these are no normal beasts of office-drone burden. They groan and creak, whether they’re carrying 2 120-pound women or 10 250 pound men. They sound like what I imagine it would be like to be inside the stomach of a person who lived on spiced sausage and black coffee. What’s even worse is that they often stop, for no reason at all, on floors that no one has pushed buttons for. They stop, sit there for a while, make a few gurgling noises, and then chug along again.

One of them did this to me the other day, as I was heading back upstairs with cup o’ java number two. I was in the elevator with 2 guys who were both going to the 6th floor with me, and the beast churned to a grumbling stop on the 3rd floor and just sat there. I felt my hands get clammy and my heart race a little. I didn’t realize my eyes were fixating on the emergency button until one of my co-workers touched my shoulder and said “that’s right. You’re new around here. Relax. It’ll move in a minute.”

We got back to our conference room, and they laughingly told the others how easy it is to tell who “the building newbies” are. “Yeah,” I chimed in. “That elevator had me close to peeing my pants, and these two are sitting there talking about the freakin’ weather like we’re all kicking back in a spa.”

Everyone got a laugh out of it, and assured me I’d be used to “The Towers of Terror” in no time.

I wanted to say “ummm … I don’t think so.” But then I thought about it a minute, and realized that they’re probably right.

When my new boss moved to town and took over “the home office” back at my old location, I thought of him as “Sir WhinesAlot.” He seemed obsessed with the dreary state of things in our building, and how unprofessional everything looked.

We were cobbled together on a shoestring budget. Our furniture was old, mismatched, threadbare and ugly. Our conference rooms doubled as storage space and were cluttered. The building was moldy and our vents blow out heat in the summer and air conditioning in the winter sometimes. The building floods now and then and we’re often visited by ants, spiders and mice.

But yet, in spite of all that nasty shit, I still found my boss’s obsession with how much our workspace sucked a bit perplexing. I, along with most of my co-workers, had dealt with it for so long, while the university looked the other way and gave us no funding to fix it, that we’d just sort of become blind to our sorry-ass state. The dreary, pathetic state of things made us miserable, so we just stopped letting our brains register our surroundings and kind of forgot how bad they were.

Now, when I go back to the home office one day a week, I look around and realize the boss is right about this. The place is a shithole. Being removed from it most of the time opens my eyes to just how gross it is when I go back.

I was amazed at how my new co-workers could stand trapped in a gurgling, squealing, Exorcist-sounding elevator that stops for no reason and not get a little tweaked out. But I guess they’ve all just been there forever, and the elevators haven’t chewed them up and spit them out yet. They just climb on in and don’t think about it.

We can get used to anything, if we’re forced to put up with it long enough. But should we?

Anyone wanna come and take a ride?