Disturbing

I'm writing this instead of working on my script. Or, I'm writing this and then I'll work on my script.

Worked late into the night Thursday doing Time-Lapse Photography at a CVS Pharmacy. It was a lot of fun... okay, it was really boring with little bits of excitement. I was able to see some footage that was shot earlier by the director and it was amazing. Really great stuff.

While looking for the above video in the Time-Lapse link, I stumbled upon this amazing story of Nicholas White who was stuck in the McGraw-Hill building in New York for over 41 hours.
Watch the amazing footage below. You can just feel the panic and boredom.



Here are some inserts from the article in the New Yorker.

"The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped."

"White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)"

"Nicholas White opened the doors to urinate. As he did so, he hoped, in vain, that a trace of this violation might get the attention of someone in the lobby."

"And then he gave up. The time passed in a kind of degraded fever dream. On the videotape, he lies motionless for hours at a time, face down on the floor.

A voice woke him up: 'Is there someone in there?'

'Yes.'

'What are you doing in there?'

"Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another."

Here is some info on Elevators that I thought was downright interesting:

"Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe—far safer than cars, to say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary. Statistics are elusive (“Nobody collects them,” Edward Donoghue, the managing director of the trade organization National Elevator Industry, said), but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals, that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more elevator accidents."

"The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment."

"In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power."

There was also some very interesting information about newly designed "Smart Elevators" and "Destination Dispatch" which cut down wait times in lobbies as well as help passengers get to their floor quicker than with the button system.

This was a fun bit of elevator etiquette from the article:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

All this has had me looking more closely at elevators. Now I don't press the call button relentlessly because I know that, like the door close button, it is a useless pursuit of alleviating my impatience. It is like creeping forward at an intersection or flashing your lights to try and coax the stoplight to change to green. It doesn't work.

It also made me appreciate the fact that I don't work in a building with more than 12 floors. I have no idea what I would do if I were trapped for as long as Nicholas White was. I would most likely go crazy.