Since I was trapped inside.
Luckily, I wasn't alone. Not because I'm an introvert and being in an elevator with talkie people is the worst possible situation for someone like me, but because according to Rosanne (my sup) I would have been a low priority for property management.
Ah, the politics of an elevator rescue.
So let me start at the beginning. I was heading home from work. I'm on the 2nd floor of a 4 story building (not including the garage). I got in the elevator with a Bonnie Hill patient and her young daughter, who was probably 7 or something (I don't know, I'm horrible with child spawn and their perceived ages). A Pulmonary employee from the 3rd floor was already inside.
The elevator reached the Lobby level where I get off, but the doors wouldn't open. They tried to, but acted like they were stuck. We try the emergency button and get nothing. We try the emergency phone but it's dead (isn't that comforting??). We try going down to the garage to see if the doors will open at any other floor but they refuse. To top it off, the elevator keeps being recalled to floors for other people but the doors never open, so we are unwitting travelers and it's making the Bonnie Hill patient feel dizzy. I call my office with my .5 bars of cell service and ask Bev to get maintenance. We can hear them talking on the 2nd floor, asking if we're all right, and how many people are inside, etc. When they learn that a patient and her small daughter are on board, they decide to call the fire department. That's about 15-20 minutes in. They manage to stop the elevator from moving at this point. The child is playing on the phone drawing butterflies. She's blessedly silent and unafraid. I think the mother is worse off than she is.
Neither the pulmonary employee or myself are worried. The elevator is not broken; we're at no risk of plummeting to our deaths (not that we'd have far to travel), it's just a little stuffy and annoying. I have plenty of battery of my phone and start facebook-tweeting the event. I even have food if we end up being trapped for too long, but needing a bathroom in the future was much more likely and pressing of an issue.
The fire department comes, and that's when things get interesting. The clinic closed at 4:30 so everyone is out there watching the action, including my supervisor who I can see in a crack through the door."Shouldn't you be working?" I call out. After all, they are getting paid to watch me suffer while I am off the clock. Rosanne snaps a photo in response.
We start to hear talk of possibly having to access the roof of the elevator and pull us up from the 3rd floor. I look up at the already partially removed panel (that literally had nothing to do with our rescue), and kind of got worried. There's no way I can pull myself up through that.
But just when things began to look grim, the doors finally open. At this point we'd been stuck for an hour, but it wasn't a horrible experience. We weren't overly crowded. No one tried to strike up awkward conversations, or anyone who ended up crying and afraid for their lives. We just kind of silently sat around on our phones, waiting for rescue. Even the little one was amazingly chill.
Unfortunately, the apparently sexy fireman that Rosanne was texting me about was currently on the 3rd floor in case we needed to be pulled up, so I never got to see him.
After going back inside to use the restroom, I decided to take the stairs down to the lobby and caught this picture of our rescue-mobile.
People joked (including me) that I should be taking the stairs from now on but I really don't care. I mean sure, taking the stairs is great but my building is built strangely and taking the stairs is kind of an inconvenience. Plus, it's hard on my ankles when I wear heels :P
So that's my excitement for the year. I can definitely strike "getting saved by sexy firemen" off my bucket list!
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