Last Friday was a crazy day at work. I won’t even try to describe everything that happened, but suffice to say that if the day had ended with finding my car entirely filled with fluffy rabbits, I would not have even blinked. One event, however, was especially noteworthy.
Towards the end of the day, I wanted to make a personal phone call, so I grabbed my cell phone and my key card and took the elevator down to the lobby. It was around seven o’clock by that point, but there were still enough people around the cubicle farm that is my workspace that I preferred to make my call somewhere more private. After I finished, I got back in the elevator, flashed my key card on the electronic pad to select my floor, and waited. Nothing happened.
[The keycard is designed to enable the keyholder to access only their floor after hours. My company is on the sixth floor, so my card should allow me 24-hour access to the sixth floor. Except that it wasn’t allowing me to leave the lobby.]
A man from the cleaning crew happened to be in the lobby while this was happening and kindly tried his security card, but it didn’t work. It was clearly an elevator problem. This would be less problematic if there were stairs that allowed access to the upper levels, but the stairwells are all locked from the inside and only allow people to exit on the ground floor. Oh, and that ground floor door is conveniently located around the outside of the building, something I discovered during an unfortunate stairwell incident during my first week on the job.
While I was standing in the elevator trying to figure out what to do, it started moving and took me up to the fourth floor. A man got in and, upon hearing that I was basically stuck in the lobby, suggested that I call someone from my company to try their card. I would normally rather eat my phone than call for help, but I didn’t see another option. When I got back downstairs, I called my boss and she offered to come get me on her way out as soon as she packed up her things.
A few minutes later, she appeared in the lobby and we boarded an elevator together. Nothing happened when she swiped her card. We pushed every button, tried holding down the “6”, and still the elevator stayed still. Which was great, really, because few things make me happier than being literally trapped with my boss at work late on a Friday.
We were at a loss, so once again I called the main line at our office to ask for help. The CEO himself answered and, before I could think about the possible ramifications, he hung up and took the elevator down to the lobby where he promptly became ensnared in my own personal mortification bubble. The three of us stood in the elevator pushing buttons and waiting silently while nothing happened. At one point we thought we were making progress because the elevator started moving up, but then we landed on the fifth floor and returned back to the lobby without hesitation.
The CEO and my boss then got out of the elevator and discussed how they both had everything they needed to go home and didn’t actually need to get back into the office. And I was all, that’s great and stuff, but I’m in the middle of a project and my keys and wallet are stashed in my desk and my coat is not nearby and it’s negative three hundred outside. As much as I wanted to hide in the bathroom and die alone, I couldn’t let them abandon me forever in the lobby.
Realizing that she was just along for the ride by then, my boss left to go home, leaving me with the CEO in the lobby. Don’t get me wrong – he’s a great guy. But he’s very successful and very sharp and very charismatic and I’m me, the girl that helpfully called out “Martin Luther King?” the other day when I overheard him ask someone the name of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s father (turns out he said daughter, not father, oops).
He took charge at that point and went looking for another ground-floor entrance to the stairs. Finding none, we got back in the elevator and tried our cards a few more times. The elevator started moving but didn’t stop until the seventh floor, where more cleaning people where gathered. The CEO was talking to them about the elevator (in Spanish, because he happens to be bilingual) when the doors suddenly shut and dropped us down to the fourth floor. Determined not to return to the lobby, we jumped out and found the entrance to the stairwell (thoughtfully placed inside the building on the upper floors) and jogged up to the sixth floor. The door to our level was locked as expected, but before I could even try calling the office to get someone to let us in, he swiftly jimmied the lock open with his key card. Then he built me an entire shopping mall out of chewing gum and discovered a new planet.
The whole disaster worked out for the best because having such a humiliating moment in front of the CEO gave me the perfect opening to ask for a promotion that I would have otherwise been too timid to ask for outright. Since he had to rescue me from the lobby and then break into our floor just to get me back to my desk, I figured there wasn’t much I should be shy about at that point. The best part is that he said yes. Now I think I’ll have to trap us together on the roof so I can ask for a company car.