The Morning Breakfast Experience
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006This morning I woke up early, so that was a good start for my day. Because normally I always end up waking late and having to rush to work with all the stress of getting caught in the usual morning traffic. So, this morning was smooth sailing for me. Wonderful… (Yeah, right!)
Reached the office with ten minutes to spare and did the usual routine stuff of settling down into the office before going off for breakfast with my colleagues.
7.30am. There were three of us going for breakfast this morning. And there are three elevators on the rear side of our office building. Just nice. One elevator for every person. The one that opened for me was the one right in the middle. We knew that elevator has been acting fishy for quite some time. It would open for us to enter, but when we enter and press the button to go up or down, it will not budge. Usually the doors would open again, so we could all exit quite safely.
However, this is what happened this morning.
I got into the elevator but my friend reminded me that it might still be faulty. So, she said she will wait outside and see if the elevator will go down. With me IN it. Smart girl. ME lah. For agreeing in the first place! Then, if the elevator does not go down or if anything goes wrong, there would still be somebody outside to help out if it got stuck. With me STILL IN it lah, of course.
The door closed. I pressed the button to go down. For a while, nothing happened. The lights on the button were still on, so I waited. Then the lights went off. So, I thought, aiyah! Stuck again lah! Pressed the button to open the doors. It wouldn’t open.
Takpe. Tried again. Tak boleh jugak. So, I pressed the button for the floor I was on. It blinked for a while, and then went off again. So, I decided to press the button to go down again.
What happened next? The elevator jerked for a second and dropped a few feet. For a while, I was like : okaayyyyyy… Now what? Waited for a bit, and nothing happened. Then I heard my friends knocking on the outer door of the elevator. I knocked back. I could hear them quite clearly through the doors, so, I told them that I think I’m stuck! Smart girl!
I’ve always aspired to become McGyver, so I tried prying the inner doors of the elevators open. They were bloody heavy, let me tell you!!! It’s like pushing open some sliding doors which weigh about a ton! But… They opened! Yiiiihaaaa!!! However, the outer ones wouldn’t budge. =( The first thing I thought off was, you SO cannot believe what they show in those movies where you see the hero or the heroine quite easily prying open the heavy doors with their bare hands. Sooo the tipu!!!
I could see my friends through the small slit between the doors. So, no problem with communicating to the outside world. Thank God! Gave them the number that was stamped inside the lift saying to call that number for any complaints on faulty elevators.
They called the number. The person who answered the phone was NO HELP at all. He asked for the location and lift number. Then when my friend asked if they have maintenance staff here who can be contacted. He said, tak tahu. Boleh ka macam tu!!!
For a while there I thought I was panicking. But I guess I felt safe because there were people out there whom I knew and trusted would be able to help me. One of them went off to get some help from the building security management and said that he’ll be back with help soon. He asked if it would be okay for them to go off for breakfast first and come back later to check on me. Hahahaha. Very funny. I told them it was okay for them to go ahead, but I said that in my heart, I am cursing them like hell!!! So, one went off while the other one stayed on to keep me company.
Told her I couldn’t hold the inner doors open for long because they were so heavy and kept on trying to slide close again, almot squishing me in the middle. So, I told her that I’m going to close the doors and if there are any updates, to just give a shout and I will hear her.
Took my 3-inch heels off, and sat down on the floor in my baju kurung. Boleh? I could still hear my friend outside. She was talking to someone else. Then I heard the voice of another male colleague talking to me through the doors asking me if I was okay. Told them that I am not okay; that I fainted but that I can talk while in faint.
I heard more voices around the doors. Another male colleague. And another! And another! Wah!!! Glamour sekejap with all the male population in the office!!! You know how all those supposedly macho men are when it comes to distressed women. Yeah, right! Better my handsome, macho gay friends in a million years than them!
While waiting for help to come along, I found the time to meditate for a while. You know, all those nonsense things that will crop into your head when you feel you are in a sticky situation and there is a possibility of death. You remember your loved ones, especially family and friends, and of course, God.
I remembered thinking that if this elevator would fall down drastically and dramatically like in the movies and I would fall to a gory death (drama je lebih!), what would my family and friends think of my death. And I thought, banyaknya hutang credit card I would leave behind for them.
Cepat-cepat mengucap, prayed for forgiveness for all my sins and hope that He will forgive me, and prayed that scene would not happen here.
I wasn’t sure if I actually panicked or not. I felt calm, but my fingers were shaking just a little bit. I think what helped a lot was that the lights did not go off and there was still air circulation in the elevator because I could feel cool air spinning on top if my head.
Another was that, there was no one else in the elevator with me. I actually felt safer being trapped there on my own. If there had been others with me in the elevator, I wouldn’t have known how to handle the situation and remain calm, especially if there were others inside who had panicked. Panic can be contagious, you know. For all I know, I could panic under those circumstances. You know me lah. Clumsy, and klutzy, and fire and spirit to the extreme.
I always thought I was kind of claustrophobic when it comes to cramped places. Maybe because I knew there were people I trusted helping me on the outside and that I could still hear them; I felt quite safe. Rasa nak baring tidur pun ada. I actually thought of doing that. So that by the time someone does come to open the doors, I would be lying down and everyone outside would think that I had fainted! Huhuhu… Drama, jangan tak drama.
The only thing I prayed greatly for was that the elevator would not go on powersave mode. That would cause the lights to go off. Now, I’m not scared of the dark. But I’m scared of the dark in elevators. You start thinking of all those ghost movies and scary stories of elevators and lifts. Takuuuutttt!!! Imagine looking into the dark and seeing something you definitely do not want to see with you in the lift! Aiyak!!! That, and that the lift wouldn’t fall all the way down from the eighth floor to the ground floor. Nauzubillah.
While sitting there contemplating my situation, my friends on the outside were doing God knows what! I could hear clanging and knocking and all kinds of other noises. At one point, I could hear someone wedging a metal piece of something between the outer doors and trying to pry them apart. But I guess that did not work either. I could only just pray that whatever they were doing, it would not make me plummet to my death. Imagine the squished remains they would find of me in my baju kurung. And my handphone and coin purse lying nearby. It would most definitely not be a pretty sight, let me tell you.
I think about fourty minutes had passed before a male voice came over the intercom. He helloed a couple of times, so I helloed back. He told me that help was on the way. Then a few minutes later, he came on the intercom again asking how many people there were in the lift. I felt like telling him there were none and that the voice he was hearing was not me but something else. But I thought better of it. I didn’t want the scary story to backfire on me. So, I said, just one. Me.
A couple of minutes later, there were a few clanging noises and then the doors opened and I looked up to see about a million faces looking down at me sitting on the floor with my heels off and staring at my handphone like I didn’t know why I was holding it in the first place (and which I couldn’t use because there was no network line available inside).
For a while, I thought, my God! Glamour sekejap! Then I thought, alamak! Malunyaaaa!!! My bosses were there and about a dozen colleagues with a look of a mixture of relief-curiosity-anxiety on their faces. Then I thought, ramai jugak kawan-kawan ofis ni yang sayang kat aku ye. Then I thought, alaaaa!!! These people are only interested in the drama of the situation. Whatever it was, I am MOST, MOST thankful and grateful for their help and attention.
The male colleague who helped me out said that he would have jumped down to carry me up if I had been lying unconscious on the floor. I told him that was what I actually planned to do but that they had caught me off guard and I that I couldn’t fake it in time. Alhamdullillah, selamat keluar.
All that drama left me feeling even more hungry than how I felt when I came into work earlier. So, I told my boss I’m going down to recuperate from the incident at the cafeteria. She could only smile. Well, she couldn’t refuse, right? Not after all that I had gone through!!! So, turun makan nasi lemak with my friends and the other so-called heros and rescuers.
I still feel hungry. I think all that adrenaline while being trapped in the elevator for about fourty minutes left me with more space in the tummy. Makin buncit dan borotlah aku lepas ni!
