Between the floors

En route to my desk from the canteen it happened.

Into the lift I went, the relevant button I pushed. The doors closed as they have thousands of time before in various places and countries. And then nothing.

Pushed the open the doors button. You guessed it. Pushed other buttons. You are clever!

A glance upwards, and a red text next to the control panel was lit up, saying "The lift is out of order". Helpful.

It was the time for the magic button. The one you always wanted to push as a child but did not quite dare (I was a rather well-behaved child).

But now. ALARM!

Gherkin also sports "ground-breaking"
lifts made by the same company

Ring it did. Phew!

In a while I was talking to someone in a control room somewhere (I still have no idea where). The problem was he hardly heard me. I managed to raise my voice for a sufficient Rod Stewart -imitation (a sore throat) and the guy finally understood I was ... stuck in a lift! Then the conversation kind of died.

I was alone. Not cinematically trapped with an attractive lady. Except that I did have my (canteen) dinner. It was not time for that yet, though. Better try to get the rescue mission underway. I check my mobile phone. No signal. It must be the steel cage surrounding me. So after some minutes had to ring the alarm again.

This time an automated female voice greeted me. "All our customer service officers are busy. Your call will be ..." That was a bit surreal, but unfortunately true. And yes. The wait-in-line music did not feel too uplifting at all. Then I hear a voice. "Fire brigade is on its way" At the same time I will hear another voice greeting me, from the lift's loudspeaker. Confusion ensues as at first I am not sure who said something about the firebrigade. Then I realise there is a security guard outside the stubbornly shut lift doors whose voice I can just about hear inside the lift (with what seems solid steel chassis) making - pardon the pun - an uplifting promise, finally.

I end up trying to shout both to the guard outside the lift and the lift-alarm man in the intercom relevant sentences and whoever I am not yelling at gets confused. As a result I get confused. Finally I manage to tell the lift-alarm man that firebrigade should be on its way. He says an engineer is on their way.

I sit down in the lift and start to eat. The meal is not great but it gives you something to do, a bit like on an aeroplane journey.

Unfortunately the lift-alarm starts to make calls on its own. One of the two or three people reaching out fron the loudspeaker sounds angry. "Who arr uu? Wherrr rr uu calling frrrom? In fact, every time a different person answers the phone which kind of the alarm bells ring to me.

One man even asks are you the bloke stuck in a lift in such and such place in London [can't remember the name] and I tell I am not. Then he asks my post code, well, the postcode of the lift, I suppose. I tell him I am not sure, but that the street address is this and this .... Obviously they do not have fancy displays pinpointing the location of the lift where you are stuck.

...

Finally I can see a crowbar reaching through the doors and can hear the sound of someone trying to force the (normally) sliding-doors open. They do not slide. A voice tells me they have to try to manually force the lift to a floorlevel to get me out and that should take 5-10 minutes.

Some minutes later, the lift feels moving a bit, but then grinds to a halt. Here I am, my colleagues having no idea where the heck is the guy. On a Saturday evening. How long for can you get stuck in a lift? Just as the annoyance levels are about to rise alarmingly, the happy end beckons. The lift starts moving. In what feels quite a normal way. The doors open. A firewoman's smile greets me. She is the observer of the happy end.

I am at the starting point of my journey.

By a weird coincidence, I know a guy who works for this particular lift manufacturer, the nationality of which also happens to the country of my origin (bizarrely and slightly worryingly to our reputation) .

I send him a text. "The firebrigade just rescued me from a rather new model of your Ecodisc-lift that got stuck between the floors in my London office. Its emergency phone also played its tricks on me." (Poor guy, to get such a message on a Saturday evening)

His reply: "It's great the firebrigade is up to its job. I always use the stairs, for a certain reason ... Have a great evening in London!"

PS. Someone might be interested for how long did I actually spend in the lift? Well, I did not finish my dinner - not only because of its lack of taste or the constant shouting to the speakerphone and the mysteryperson outside the lift. I was trapped inside for 20-30 minutes.

PPS. Thank you for everyone I did not have the chance to thank for getting me out of there so quickly. I did not want to end up being a celebrity whose claim to fame was "got stuck for the longest period known for man in a lift". It would have been unlikely that this would have gone unnoticed as the lift happened to be in a rather well-known media establishment in central London. Who knows, perhaps just for the sake of a good news story on a slow news day ... week ...... two weeks it could be tricky to ... get me out of there!

After all, an old hack I came across just after having got out of the cage seemed to genuinely treat me with respect when having queried if someone was really stuck in the lift I exclusively revealed to him that it was me who was stuck in the lift.

Something out of ordinary - for the workplace, anyway - my unconventional dinner-break was.