Getting stuck in a lift is no fun
It's Friday, after hours. Our IT office is on the 3rd floor and normally I take the stairs because the lift is one of those hydraulic things and thus rather slow. In those days I was quite fit and could steam up the stairs from the basement to the top floor in the time the lift took to get just past ground level as personnel (who established that measurement) had learned to stay well out of my way when I did one of those runs because You Do Not Impair The IT Manager :). How long ago "in those days" was will become clear in a moment.
This time, my father in law came to pick me up as he was in the area, so, not thinking (also partly because it never had a problem before) we take the lift down. Which gets stuck a short while later. This is a basic lift, so no phone, and an alarm that only sounds in the building. It's Friday after hours, so the building is otherwise empty. Uh oh. It's weekend..
This was in 1991 or so, so mobiles were not that ubiquitous, 2.5G and WiFi had not even been invented yet, analogue and in general as unwieldy as a brick but I had just bought my own first, a NEC P3, which was far nicer and could invisibly fit inside a jacket, even with its long range antenna fitted, which was my habit as cell phone towers were not that widespread in London yet and signal at home was not great.
This office was in Craven Street (since then all converted into residential premises), which due to being next to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall had at least decent signal, so even in what is theoretically a metal Faraday cage I could thankfully get a signal and thus managed to call the fire brigade. Nervously, because in those days the batteries already didn't last a whole day so it had only 25% left (I'd already used my spare that day). They took half an hour to get to the building, somehow got through the front door without breaking anything (I assume they have good lock picks?) and located us. After that it was a matter of going to the pump in the basement and manually vent the oil back into the reservoir until we got to a level where we could exit.
It would have been a rather long weekend otherwise, and even that short time convinced me I'd not get into that situation again. I don't care about heights, but being in a closed box with no exit makes me nervous (for instance, you would not have been able to get me into that Titan submersible).
Since I've made a habit of automatically checking lifts for fitted communication if I'm in an empty building. I still prefer the stairs anyway, but if you're on the 22nd floor it gets a tad harder upwards, and due to knee surgery it's no longer as much fun..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
