Going Up?

I have noticed that quite a few elevator buttons light up red when pressed, which is a good thing for me as today's color is red and I have a few elevator stories.


The first story happened a few days ago when I was leaving work. I got into the elevator and pressed 4. Only problem was that I was already on the 4th floor so the elevator doors just closed and I sat inside, all by myself, and waited. I am sure it didn't take me long to figure out what had gone wrong, it just felt like an eternity, and I was glad I was the only one in the lift. I then pressed B made sure that the button turned red and continued on my way only slightly embarrassed. Only slightly as this was not the first (nor the last I am sure) time that this had happened to me.


But this incident reminded me of another elevator escapade. I was working downtown in a large office building and like many other office drones I took the train in. I mention the train because many of my co-workers took the train and we all got to work at the same time resulting in a mad dash for the elevators. There were quite a few elevators in this building, six cars I believe, but only 2 seemed to work in the morning causing a pile up of people in the lobby. On this day I waited in line and got into an elevator when the time came, pressed 11 and moved to the back of the car to allow more people to get in. Now 11 floors is not a lot but it takes awhile to get there when you are stopping at every floor, so I was off in my own little world when I noticed that the doors were closing. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the number 11 that is displayed on the wall of the floor so you know where you are. This being my floor, and not in the mood to go up to 18, I flung my arm out the door to stop it from closing. Then I made some odd noise that was clearly not English to try to apologize for my lack of attention. This noise only resulted in the other people in the car being made aware of the fact that I was an idiot and didn't know what floor I worked on. Yes, that is exactly what their faces said as I watched the doors close after I made my embarrassing escape.


Now on to my favorite elevator story. It was a rainy day and a co-worker and myself were walking back to our office from a meeting the next building over. My co-worker had an umbrella and had started taking it down as we walked to the elevator. As we approached, the doors to one of the elevators was closing and my co-working wanting to get back to work stuck out her umbrella to stop the closing doors. The umbrella worked but the motion of stopping the doors caused the umbrella to spring open inside the elevator. Once the doors fully opened we saw a very well dressed man inside the car and much to our surprise he was now coated in little water droplets from head to toe. Like I said it was a rainy day. My co-worker apologized for the light shower that was bestowed upon this man while I hit 13 and the doors closed. The man did not say one word on our journey to the 13th floor and once we exited the car my co-worker and I could not contain our laughter any longer and both burst into laughs before the doors and fully closed. I am sure the man heard us laughing but perhaps next time he will hold the lift or risk another umbrella shower. We laughed for a good 10 minutes and disrupted the rest of the floor with our laughter but we just couldn't contain ourselves, it was all just so surreal.