Thursday, February 16, 2006

Life in a Crowded Elevator

Today, whilst at the shopping mall hunting a birthday gift for the prettiest little lady from San Diego county, had a bit of a scare. I parked on the top level of the mall, so that I might better remember which of the floors amongst the myriad of abbreviations and hyphenations of designated parking areas I was in, but this left me stranded waiting for an elevator for some time. As these elevators go, they don't make their way to the extremities of the shaft (pardon the pun) too often. When they do, quite a number of people have piled in them. On the way down to the mall, I waited for about five minutes and crammed into the box with a dozen or so people. After wandering aimlessly around the mall for an hour, looking unsuccessfully for a suitable gift for my wife, I hopped into an already crowded elevator to go back up.

I was the person in the front and middle area of the elevator, the one you'd first see if the doors opened. There was a small girl of about four or five years old standing to my left, whom I glanced over at just briefly. When we arrived at our next floor, the aluminum paneled doors began to slide open and caught either her arm or her blouse. This dragged this girl's arm into the mechanism of the door itself, causing her to immediately start shrieking. The elevator doors started sensing there was feedback, but would neither retract nor continue to open. All of the sudden, a dozen people standing quite close to one other just started freaking out. Strangely, the buttons to open and close the door were inoperable, and there was not a stop all actions button on the panel either. She was screaming her head off for a good ten seconds before myself and another man, him on the left-side with me on the right, began to use our legs to push against the door frames while grabbing the inside of each panel, to try and close the doors, hopefully bringing whatever had been eaten by the mechanism back into the cab. It took another ten or so seconds to get the doors to budge enough in the opposite direction, as they were still trying to open, for her arm to get free.

Upon a quick inspection, it looks as if she was going to have some serious bruising and might have lost a layer of skin from getting a pretty bad rasberry. Yet, her hand and arm functions made it seem like she had not broken anything. Her mom and others in the care were visibly freaked out. My guess is that girl will start taking the stairs for the next few years.

posted by ncawthon at 4:22 PM