Elevated Anecdote

Blogging is a fantastic way of recording and sharing personal anecdotes but it has struck me that this is only true for those events that have happened during the era of blogging. And with that in mind I have decided that I want to put some old anecdotes from my past here. I will start with one particular incident in this entry. And - like that incident - I will try to limit my anecdotes to just those that are somehow distinctive and also to those that involve friends who have been important to me.

Back when I was still at uni I spent a lot of weekends with a handful of friends who had met via an event at the start of our uni lives - the United Nations Youth Associate (UNYA) Tertiary Youth Conference 1991. This story has nothing to do with that week-long con but it is how Us as we called ourselves got together. One of those involved was my longest-term friend to date - Guy - whom I had met at the start of secondary school.

One day we were all getting together to go have a picnic by the bay. And as we were all uni students we carpooled in one or two cars and drove from suburb to suburb collecting passengers. We had come to collect another friend - Sean - who at the time lived on the fourteenth floor of apartments on Nicholson Street in Carlton. So Guy and I took the elevator to go and collect him. As the lift rose we did something kinda stupid.

There was a song in the charts at the time by the teenaged hip-hop duo Kriss Kross called Jump Jump. It was pretty trashy and we knew it but nonetheless something possessed us both to 'jump jump' in unison as the lift moved. How were we to know that two young men jumping was all it would take for an elevator to get stuck between floors?

And the only way of communicating with the outside world was via a buzzer button. Yep - these lifts were too primitive to have an intercom and we were living in the 90s. Who had a mobile phone back then? The buzzer seemed to attract the attention of one elderly resident - we knew that because she called to us via the walls and doors. From that we established that mechanics were on the way to look at the problem.

All we could do was sit. I had some paper in my backpack and - well - it may surprise you but in those days I was a bit imaginative and a tiny bit melodramatic. So I suggested that we may need to keep the paper to write farewell messages in case we never escaped. Guy - whose technical ability and sarcasm far exceeds mine - assured me that we still had a hour or so of oxygen. He persuaded me to share the paper and play Noughts & Crosses with him.

A bit later the elderly resident called to us to ask "are you still there". Um - yes - yes we were.

Eventually the elevator did move level with a floor and the doors opened. We ran all the way down the stairs to find the others who convinced us to come with them back into the other elevator to go fetch Sean. I think we spent 45 minutes in that lift. Till that time such an experience was just something from movies. In the end all I lost was some paper but I got a pretty good anecdote from the thing. And I think we enjoyed the picnic later that day too.

I promise to use more commas rather than just all these dashes. I will try.