Nicholas WhiteFriday, October the 15th, 1999. Nicholas White is working overtime in his office located on the 39th floor of the McGraw-Hill building with his colleagues when he decided to head on downstairs for a smoke. It must have felt like an ordinary night for Nicholas, just another night spent in the office while pouring over endless papers and trying to make ends meet in the late hours of the night. Nobody likes to work overtime I am sure, nobody likes to be stuck in an office with the rest of your work team without the comfort of your bed or a good night's sleep. So Nicholas grabbed his packet of cigarettes and headed down onto the streets below for a smoking break, trying to suck in as much fresh air as he could before going back upstairs to continue with the rest of the dreadful night. He flicked the end of the cigarette onto the sidewalk and extinguished the tiny flames with his shoes, the soft sighing of the butt faded under the pressure of his weight. It still felt like a normal night to Nicholas, and anybody else would have felt the same way as well. In truth, however, this overtime at the office is going to be Nicholas' longest night in his life.
He strolled back to the lift lobby and pressed the button for the elevator to arrive. It must have felt slightly liberating to be standing in the middle of the lift lobby alone in contrast to the normal bustling crowd in the early mornings. Nicholas pictured the entire building being owned by himself, a harmless fantasy for an average office worker such as himself. Nicholas was a 34-year-old New York production manager, and if nothing has happened in his life big enough for him to own a building thus far, it probably won't happen anytime soon. Nicholas has dreams like that, these are the kind of thoughts he entertains himself with while waiting for his bladder to drain at the urinal, while waiting for the light to turn green at the junction, while taking an elevator back up to the office after a cigarette break like what he did that very night. The numbers on top of the buttons flickered with every passing floor, and it was at the 13th floor when Nicholas realized that the ventilation fans in the ceiling lights stopped operating. The elevator stopped traveling up as well, dangling there in midair in the middle of the shaft like a pendulum that doesn't swing. Nicholas pressed the emergency button for help, but silence and static greeted him on the other side of the machine like a bad Halloween prank. He was stuck in the lift on a Friday night, and he is going to remain that way for the next 41 hours. The worst part - it is based on a true story.
Nicholas White was an actual person who worked overtime on that fateful night with his colleagues, an actual person who got stuck in the elevator for a grand total of 41 hours over the weekend with no food, no water, and no way of contacting the outside world whatsoever. It sounds like a worst nightmare coming true, to be trapped within a confined space for almost two days, it's kind of like being thrown into the isolation cells in the prison somehow. Because the entire building was vacant over the weekend, Nicholas was forced to remain in the elevator for the entire duration of time, all the while praying for somebody to hear his call out for help, or perhaps notice the abnormalities in the lift that he was in. Eventually, Nicholas made his way out on Sunday afternoon, but his harrowing experience was never fully told to the world until now, when the surveillance footage of Nicholas trapped in the elevator surfaced over the Internet and caused quite an uproar.
It looked like the extreme social experiment, and he sort of looked like a laboratory rat while being inside the elevator, prancing about and just waiting for somebody to rescue him. It was amusing at first when you see Nicholas just leaning against the back of the lift and waiting for the lift doors to open. But as the hours dragged on, his patience gave way to desperation, and then to intense fear. The strangest thing was, maintenance workers came in over the weekend to check up on the other three elevator, but nobody ever noticed the stranded man or the malfunctioned elevator. From the video, you could see people moving in and out of the other three elevator doors, shifting their ladders and checking the lifts one by one. It's strange how none of them actually noticed that one of the lifts wasn't moving at all, and how none of them bothered to check out the problem either. Nicholas was trapped like that, with a pack of cigarettes, over the weekend and alone in a small dark place.
I saw the video online a few days ago and felt rather disturbed by the whole ordeal, experienced by a man whom I have never met. I have been stuck in elevators from time to time, but then never longer than a minute after pressing the emergency button. More than the thought of being trapped inside an elevator for 41 hours, I was even more disturbed by how ignorant and neglectful humans can be, how we have all created these little separate spheres around ourselves and blocked everybody else out. It seems to be the case now, the way we have been so separated and so divided from one another in this world, so much so that we do not even care or bother with the life of a man dangling from the steel cables in the elevator shaft. We are so self-absorbent, concerned only with what we are doing and what we are going to do. It's difficult to reach out to people right now, because distances are growing further and further apart. We have too many things to worry about, too many things on our minds to even consider the existence of others around us. We let things like that happen, because we have been detached from each other and then swallowed up into a world of our own.
My transit card ran out of money yesterday morning, which meant that I had to trouble my mother to give me a ride to the station. I had a paper later on in the afternoon, but I caught the early train to school anyway, since I wanted to take my time about traveling. The train was not exactly packed up as it would be at peak hours, though all the seats were already taken up by fellow commuters all around myself. I was leaning against a pole in the middle of the carriage then, just watching the rest of the passengers while thinking of the video I just saw in the morning before leaving the house. And then I realized, in that moment, why things like that can go by unseen by the public, how it is possible for a man to die on the train and no one to realize that. It is the way we have been consumed by those little gadgets that we carry around, robbing us of the human touch that is really the basis of anybody's emotional survival in this world.
Everybody had a little something to kill their time while on the train. The young punk seated in the corner of the carriage was pounding his thumbs all over the buttons on the PSP, slaying monsters and then trying to execute the moves with spectacular pixelated magic. The businessman to my right, buried himself in his PDA as he read e-mails, replied to text messages, ran through his contact lists, replied to even more e-mails. Most of the other people had earphones plugged into their ears, their eyes were closed as they subtly bobbed their heads to the music that blasted through their eardrums. It was not difficult to tell how the people so naturally positioned themselves away from one another, as if there were foot holds in the floor for people to fit their shoes in. They were all standing with their backs to one another, trying to maintain a certain comfort distance from a random stranger, trying to stay as far as possible from that other person.
I imagined to myself, what must have been going through those people's minds. That man, that man is sneezing his nose off. He must be sick, is the flu contagious? What is that smell, it smells like rotten tuna and armpits, stay away from me old man. An empty seat! How nice! I need to get there first before anybody else, I need to pretend to be sleeping because I don't want those puppy-looks from old folks or pregnant ladies when they board the train without available seats. Look at me slash these monsters, take that you imp of the underworld! I shall banish you into hell with my sword! Take that! I like the music that I am hearing, it gives me something to think about when I am on the train. It's four stops away from my station, I hope that I can get off soon enough, the man next to me is sitting too close. I better look the other way, I don't want to have eye contact with anybody on the train, how awkward! That seat was supposed to be mine, that selfish bastard! He dashed as if it was a matter of life and death! I'm pregnant, I'm pregnant! Is it so hard to stand for fifteen minutes? I need to sit down, somebody? Anybody? No one, surprise surprise. That boy is looking at me, I hope he doesn't try to start a conversation, he doesn't look very normal, and I'd feel embarrassed. Leave me alone, just like that, just like now. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Alone.
It's this way on every train, in every country, around the world. Not just on trains, but it just feels like people have grown apart over the years somehow. They say that we are only fractions of the souls that belonged to our ancestors, if the theory of reincarnation is true. If you look at it from a purely mathematical point of view, our population has increased a hundred and thousand times over the years, and does that mean that we are merely a part of the original souls of the past if reincarnation is indeed true? Is that why we are so separated in this world, so segregated, so ignorant that we can turn a blind eye to a man being stuck in the lift for 41 hours? It's sickening to know that this thing that we share in between humans, the camaraderie of being the dominant species, is being taken for granted and forgotten by so many people. It becomes hard to reach out at first, and then it becomes a complete isolation, and who knows what is going to happen afterwards?
It's as if we are all taking our own invisible elevators now, closing and boxing ourselves up like a clam. We mind our own business, we enjoy the times of solitude and in complete ignorance of others. It's interesting at the beginning, but then it gets a little boring after some time, then it becomes lonely. Loneliness then gives way to fear, then terror, then the unknown completely consumes you like a hungry beast. People are all trapped within our own stranded elevators in the long dark elevator shafts, it's just that some of us are still waiting for someone to rescue them, while others have already settled down and accepted that they are going to be stuck there for a very, very long time. At times, all we need to do, is to press the "Open" button for the world to come in, and for you to get out. It's a natural law, it's how things work. We can never live within ourselves - forever.
Eventually, Nicholas returned to his job, his office, his desk. The chair was still in the same place, his jacket was still hung on the back of the seat. His briefcase was still leaning against the side of the table underneath, but little Post-it notes now covered his computer monitor screen. They were left by his colleagues on Friday night, the night that seemed so far away from where he was. They were angry and hateful words from his colleagues, after he failed to return from his cigarette break during overtime that night. They thought that he slipped away, they thought that he left the job to them and snuck back home. But none of them noticed the man trapped in the lift either, nobody noticed that Nicholas' briefcase was still in the office, and couldn't have snuck home without it. Nobody noticed, nobody cared.
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