Besides all the other endless opportunities life gives you to put yourself into a situation where embarrassment and discomfort are your enemies as well as only friends, lift interactions must be amongst the worst of them. Not only are they inevitable to cut out of your life, unless you’re a 300 pound bodybuilder who willingly sprints up the stairs with two shopping bags in his hands, but they also give no chance of escape. Once you’re in it, there’s no other room to take refuge in, no windows to look out of in an attempt to distract yourself from the reality that you are stuck in a small space of 1 m^2, like mass produced chicken in battery cages. The only options you have left to prevent yourself from staring at one of the passengers for an uncomfortable second too long is to either scroll up and down your social media feeds, making it look like you’re immersed in an important conversation or Twitter rant, or to simply look down on your feet, which is nearly impossible to do without looking like an obedient, defeated child. Facing the available corner of the lift is not very helpful either, as it increases the likelihood of people looking for hidden cameras inside the lift, thinking that they might be starring in a Paranormal Activity-esque Youtube prank (and when was the last time we really enjoyed either of them anyway?).
However, despite its inevitable awkwardness and claustrophobic tendencies, lifts also do some good by for example carrying the occasional short story from one floor to another. Sometimes they can be told through objects and the looks on people’s faces that are carrying said objects, and in very few and more brave cases, it’s the lift attendants themselves who give away snippets of a story you’ll never hear about in full detail. The mystery of these stories lies in the fact that we only stop by for a brief second (or minute, if that one kid in the lift decided to push all the buttons at once, forcing us to take part in an involuntary and boring roller coaster ride). Even if a possible interaction is fuelled by our curiosity to find out more, most of the time we don’t get any chances to ask all the questions that arose throughout the lift affair. It’s only our imagination that can fill the gaps of their stories, but perhaps by carrying them with us into our own lives and apartment floors, we fill them ourselves with our own stories.
I was on my way to work on a late Sunday morning, getting ready to cure some hangovers with more beers in the bar that I worked at, when a bunch of teenage lads inaudibly told me the first lift story of the day. The doors opened on the fourth floor to welcome five tired faces, last night’s escapades clearly written across all of them. About six empty cardboard boxes, that I presumed had been filled with pizzas, beers and other things they probably thought they might find use for, took the attention away from their stained joggers and wrinkled t-shirts and a smell so complex, that it was impossible to identify their original sources. For a second they just stood there in front of the entrance with a confused but also thoughtful look on their faces, trying to figure out how to navigate around the tiny space they were about to enter. As if they’re a team in a game of physical real life Tetris, they threw some mumbling words at each other in an attempt to successfully communicate the ins and outs of their game strategy. After an improvised choreography that lasted a couple of seconds, some of them decided to either enter sideways, lift up their boxes, or even spoon one of their mates while standing up and holding their stuff as close to their bodies as possible. One more step in their mission was thereby finally completed.
Like penguins sheltering themselves from Antarctic weather conditions by huddling together very tightly, they performed the same technique in order to distract themselves from the fact that they were pretty much out of any other option. Every time the lift opened on another floor, an instant silence filled the now tiny gaps in our little space. For a split second it was so quiet that I’m almost sure everyone held their breath in anticipation and the hope that there wasn’t going to be any more passengers trying to squeeze themselves in. We all knew that it would've been almost as unrealistic as when people hold up their cups of beer in the air during concerts, genuinely believing that they won’t spill it on everyone else behind them as they attempt to make their way to the front. A wave of relief poured over us after every round of the lift equivalent to Russian roulette, and it almost felt as if all of our stories intertwined as we looked at each other triumphantly and exited the lift together on the ground floor. At this point I could only wonder whether they knew that the lift on the other side was working again, sparing themselves from another potential round of stress. Perhaps this will be my input to their story another time.
