Runaway Elevator

Friday evening, for the first time in my life, I was really scared in an elevator. To give a little background, I work on the 36th floor. My elevator bank serves the 27th floor, to the 39th floor. If there are no stops in between, it takes less than 1 minute for me to get from the lobby to my floor, and the same for the reverse trip.

Well, I got into the elevator on Friday evening and pressed “L.” The elevator started to descend normally, then suddenly, stopped so abruptly that my knees almost buckled. I was pretty startled. About then, one of the building maintenance/security guy’s voice was coming through the intercom, telling me not to worry, they were going to try to get me out of there.  Try to get me out?!! The guy instructed me through the intercom, saying that when the elevator arrived at the lobby level, that I should quickly exit. I was thinking, “No duh, dude. That was my plan even before the elevator started acting up.” Right about then the elevator started going up again. I told the guy through the intercom that the car was was going up, not down. He said “huh? it shouldn’t be,” as the car once again stopped,  very abruptly. This time I almost came off of the floor. It was at this point, that I noticed my heart rate was beginning to quicken. I was thinking to myself , “why couldn’t I have just worked late, tonight?” After being stopped somewhere between “L” and “27” for a few minutes, I felt the floor start to drop away again. When it came to a halt, this time, the display had changed from “XX” to “L.” The guy on the intercom was instructing me to get out. I told him that I would love to, but the doors weren’t open. No sooner had I made this remark, than the car jolted down another couple of feet and the doors opened to the ground floor lobby. Needless to say, I exited very quickly, as I had been instructed to do. Holy crap! I just wanted to get my weekend started, was all of that really necessary?