You are currently browsing the daily archive for June 5th, 2008.
There’s a mischievous child in me that always wants to pull those red fire triggers when I pass them in the hall. I’m always like, oooh, I wonder what would happen. I have to keep being my own parent, scolding “hands to yourself!”
Thus, I was very disappointed when it was Hector who went ahead and picked up the fireman’s phone in the elevator last night. I was stuck in an elevator, with a homosexual Hispanic named Hector, for approximately three minutes yesterday.
Those signs by the elevators? The ones with the very helpful stick figures and red tongues of fire that tell you to please walk to the nearest stairway, and not to call the elevator if the place is about to burn down? They should also apply to electricity-threatening thunderstorms. Apparently.
So the roads were washing out and the stoplights weren’t working and there were felled trees all over the place. But whatever, I was going to the fricking 12th floor, so naturally, the elevator was my go-to ride up.
You have chosen … poorly, the Indiana Jones-style crusader in my mind said, just as the lights flickered out and the elevator stopped. It made a terrible sighing moan, like that’s it, I give up. I was sure we’d be plummeting to the ground any second, dropped to a dark and watery demise.
Hector was very chipper, and made some joke about how he should have skipped the gym and run the stairs instead. Or done both and gotten more muscles. Or something, I’m not really sure, as I was trying to block it out, thinking “these can’t be the last words I hear. They can’t.”
We talked briefly, then he was all, well, I don’t think we’re moving. And then he just goes right ahead and opens the little door and takes out the phone! Okay, sure, he was standing right in front of it, and he was a lot closer. But come on! Diplomatic process, people! Couldn’t we have drawn straws, or something?
As it happened, we started moving at just that second, so he didn’t even get to talk (Ahahahaha! Serves you right, phone stealer!). I exited with him on nine, then walked the remaining flights to 12. I let myself into J’s apartment, and with a renewed appreciation for life and its goodness, unloaded the juices and snacks I managed to snag from the grocery store just before they closed for power loss. I had to get the non-refrigerated kind, because all of the good stuff had been removed to some secret refrigerated room in the underground (or something equally mysterious, I imagine). He’s gotten some kind of a cold, J has, and he was working really late, so I left these small signs of myself as a little surprise.
I don’t think he understands the resolve it took to bring them there, but I’m okay with secrets. Sometimes, they’re quite powerful, just to hold.
