Esprit de l’ascenseur
There’s something about lifts that causes a strange impatience. Well, it causes me to be strangely impatient, anyway. This struck me the other day when I was standing in the lift, ready to go, and someone hit the button outside, causing the doors to open again.
It proved to be a smiling young lady of charming appearance.
“Oh, hello!” she said, in a tone which implied she knew who I was and expected me to know who she was.
Alas, I didn’t; I’m afraid I’ve been roaming these corridors for too long and my memory is too poor. There was a lady a few years ago who had worked quite closely with me for two years in the past, but her name triggered no recollection at all; even after meeting her, chatting for a while, and working out intellectually who she must be, only the faintest of real intimations of recollection crept into the back of my mind. Of course, it was easy for her: I still look pretty much the way I did twenty years ago, apart from a certain augmentation of girth, whereas she had hair of a different colour and length, was a different shape, and had completely changed her mode of dress in the meantime, from too-late-for-the-sixties studentish to Margaret Thatcher with some of the edges rounded off.
Anyway, back to the lift. You would have thought this was an agreeable, perhaps intriguing encounter – I was only on my way back to the desk to revise an agenda or something – but my immediate reaction was to grind my teeth in annoyance at the delay to the lift. I mean, what? Even if the lift had been held up by a tedious old scrote with the evident intention of whistling loudly throughout our journey to the fourth floor, it ought to have been only very mildly trying.
But that’s what lifts do to you. It’s like those people who used to throw themselves desperately onto moving trains at Clapham Junction as though there weren’t another one two minutes behind; there’s some circuit in the brain that just locks on to the immediate task of travelling and starts giving any delay a negative value out of all proportion to reality.
Of course it varies. We used to have very poor lifts and not enough of them for the building. You would spend an average of fifteen minutes waiting in the lobby for one to arrive at all, and then you would find that the lift was held up first by one late arrival, then again by another, and so on. In the end, no lift could leave until it was packed tight and had been standing on the ground floor for about twenty minutes. Now that was annoying.
But nowadays, in a refurbished building, with relatively zippy lifts and only four floors to deal with, it’s not really a problem. You’re never going to be held up for long.
I ought to try to be one of those kindly souls who, when they hear the patter of feet along the corridor, pushes the button to open the door again so that the latecomer isn’t left behind. Somebody thanked me for doing that once, little knowing that it had only happened by mistake, because my brain can’t reliably distinguish between the little ideograms which mean open, and those which mean close now. (Um, let’s see, if the triangles face outwards, it means the doors open, so… too late…)
Of course some people just do have annoying lift manners. The person who gets in at floor two to travel to floor three. The person who holds the door open with their arm while finishing a lengthy conversation. The person who deliberately closes the doors in your face.
There was a real classic last week: four people all going to the fourth floor. When the lift stopped, the skinnny lady in 1950s glasses at the front held out her arms in a sort of prophet like gesture, barring the way out.
“Third floor! Stop! It’s the third floor!” she exclaimed.
“That’s strange,” said the mild man in a grey suit standing next to me, “It says four on the indicator. These things are always broken, aren’t they?”
The doors closed again, the lift jolted, and began going back down to the ground where we had just come from.
“What so, it won’t go to the fourth floor?” asked the mild, and possibly a bit dim, man in the grey suit, “That’s funny.”
“That was the fourth floor.”
“Well it said three on the wall opposite” said the skinny woman.
“Yes – that was the indicator for the lift opposite.”
What? The young lady of charming appearance? Did I remember her in the end? No – she just thought I was Phil. On the second floor the lift stopped again and a whistling old scrote got in; but at least he was only going to the third.
