Suitably Flip

Like Die Hard, Only Boring

I can't imagine another ordeal that could be simultaneously so worrisome and so soul-smotheringly boring.

A quick cigarette break by Business Week employee Nicholas White turned into a nightmare when his elevator stopped dead in its shaft and trapped him there for a crazy 41 hours—all of it caught on a security camera.
...
White got into elevator car 30 to return to his office in the McGraw-Hill building on Sixth Avenue in New York. It was an express elevator, designed for traffic efficiency, with no stops below the 30th floor, and it jammed around the 13th late on a Friday night. ... Faced with a blind wall behind the doors, no answer to the alarm or shouting and a locked hatch, he got desperate then depressed.
...
He was just stuck in a box barely big enough to lie down in. Rescue finally came 41 hours later, and no one knows why the jam happened. The crazy part? Eight different security guards failed to spot him on the camera.

This took place more than eight years ago, but The New Yorker has just put up a time-lapse video of White's plight (as captured by the security cameras no one was bothering to monitor), so you can experience his 2-day descent into ennui in internets time.

Content warning: even sped up 1,000x, it's still pretty tedious.

Comments

Like Die Hard, Only Boring

I can't imagine another ordeal that could be simultaneously so worrisome and so soul-smotheringly boring.

A quick cigarette break by Business Week employee Nicholas White turned into a nightmare when his elevator stopped dead in its shaft and trapped him there for a crazy 41 hours—all of it caught on a security camera.
...
White got into elevator car 30 to return to his office in the McGraw-Hill building on Sixth Avenue in New York. It was an express elevator, designed for traffic efficiency, with no stops below the 30th floor, and it jammed around the 13th late on a Friday night. ... Faced with a blind wall behind the doors, no answer to the alarm or shouting and a locked hatch, he got desperate then depressed.
...
He was just stuck in a box barely big enough to lie down in. Rescue finally came 41 hours later, and no one knows why the jam happened. The crazy part? Eight different security guards failed to spot him on the camera.

This took place more than eight years ago, but The New Yorker has just put up a time-lapse video of White's plight (as captured by the security cameras no one was bothering to monitor), so you can experience his 2-day descent into ennui in internets time.

Content warning: even sped up 1,000x, it's still pretty tedious.