\tShe wasn’t wrong. The doors remained clamped shut and the lift did not respond when I jabbed at the buttons. I guessed I’d only got about as far as the 6th floor but clearly I wasn’t going any further.<\/p>\n
\tTime to raise the alarm, I told myself. The instructions beneath the alarm button said, “Press for 3 seconds.”<\/p>\n
\tI pushed the button and flinched as a loud bell clanged in the lobby outside. My natural instinct for not<\/strong> drawing attention to myself kicked in and made me let go.<\/p>\n \tAh, silence.<\/p>\n \tBut no assistance. So I gritted my teeth and pressed the button again, holding it for the full three seconds until the little yellow alarm light came on and a voice spoke from the intercom: “Yeah?”<\/p>\n \tI gave my location and the disembodied voice said, “OK, I’ll send a couple of guys.”<\/p>\n \tThe intercom went dead again.<\/p>\n \tI looked around and considered my situation. I tried<\/em> to be rational.<\/p>\n \t \tDon’t panic, I told myself.<\/p>\n \tFirst off, I put the papers I was carrying on the floor. No sense in needlessly wasting energy.<\/p>\n \tI briefly considered what would be the best position to adopt should the lift suddenly plunge. I know enough physics to discount the ‘jump up just before impact’ fallacy. In the first place, judging the time of impact would be impossible in a windowless box. And secondly, the relative<\/em> upward motion would only have taken the the tiniest smidgen off my downward momentum, soon to be imparted to the planet.<\/p>\n \tI figured the chances of surviving such an impact would be miniscule but wondered if spreading myself on the floor of the lift, head cushioned by my arms, would have brought me closest<\/em> to surviving the fatal drop.<\/p>\n \tBut in any case, I told myself, that’s ridiculous. These lifts have fail-safe mechanisms. Even if the cable were to be severed, there must be a braking system of some kind. Right? People only plunge to their deaths in lifts in the movies. But this isn’t The Towering Inferno<\/em><\/a> or The Omen<\/em><\/a> or Speed<\/em><\/a>. No wait, in Speed<\/em> Keanu Reeves and Jeff Daniels turn up to rescue the terrified elevator occupants.<\/p>\n \tThinking of movies caused me to look up. Surely there had to be a hatch in the ceiling though which, if push came to shove, I could clamber to safety? In the movies, there’s always such a hatch. Always.<\/p>\n \tBut there wasn’t one. The ceiling was composed of two sections joined by a metal strip. It looked fairly immovable. If I needed to, I figured, I could try to climb onto the hand rail to see if I could dislodge it. But what then? I have no head for heights and wouldn’t want to ruin my jacket on an oily cable.<\/p>\n \t“Hello? Hello?”<\/p>\n \tThe voice came from outside. Slowly the doors were prised open revealing the floor of level 6 at about one metre above my feet. I tossed my papers through the gap and clambered out to the two engineers who had come to my rescue. Neither of them looked remotely like Keanu Reeves or Jeff Daniels.<\/p>\n \tBut I guess that was a relief. The real world is more prosaic but also more lawful than in the movies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday, I had a new experience that tested my scientific mettle to the limit: I got stuck in a lift. There I was, dropping smoothly from the 7th floor of the Huxley building on my way to a student viva, … Continue reading ![\"Lift](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2636\/4053499435_80f8143ecb.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n