Something interesting happened at work last night:

I'm up in the hotel doing one of our nightly Security Walks when I notice the 8th and 9th floors had a kind of "skunk funk" going on. It happens occasionally; fumes from the kitchen equipment or the parking garage have been known to waft up through the elevator shafts. There's really nothing to be done about it save spraying the affected areas with our floral air freshener and hoping for the best. So, when I finished my Walk down on the 4th floor I decided to take the staff elevator up to the upper floors, since that particular elevator has its entrance on each floor next to the Housekeeping cubby, which would be the most logical place to look for the air freshener. I call my coworker to let her know where I will be for the next little while.

*Beep!* 5th floor. *Beep!* 6th floor. *Beep!* 7th floor. *Beep!* 8th floor. *Beep!* *Shimmy!* *Shudder!* *Ka-thunk!*... and the elevator lurches to a sudden stop, with me grabbing wildly at the sheer walls around me for support. The display above the door says we've reached the 9th floor, but the doors remain shut. The button light for the 9th floor has gone out, so I try pressing it again; still, the elevator does not move. In desperation I try the door open and close buttons, neither of which are responsive. Ditto the buttons for the 8th and 7th floors. Well FAN-EFFING-TASTIC! It's 3:50am on Boxing Day*, my coworker and I are the only staff in the hotel for another 2.5 hours and I'm stuck in the bleeding elevator at the top of the bleeding building. I use the elevator call button to get hold of my coworker, who calls our maintenance guy on the two-way radio. He advises her to get in touch with our service representative (the repairman is 30 minutes away) and in the meantime gives us some other things to try, all of which fail to remove me from the elevator.

Thank goodness it was a slow night, or I think I should have lost my mind completely! My coworker and I played some games over the intercom ("I Spy", "20 Questions" and the like...) and I amused myself when she had work to do by inventing other trapped passengers: there was Wilson the Leftover Muffin Chunk. Bendy, Steve and Tigger were borne of rips and defects in the linoleum.

After an hour and a quarter, and two calls to the service rep, I finally receive word from my coworker via the intercom that the repairman is here and on his way up. When the door finally opens I can see that the elevator actually stopped a good two feet from being level with the 9th floor. The repairman handed me out of the elevator, and was very distressed by the fact that I had been trapped for over an hour; you see, he had received the call to help only twenty minutes before he arrived, after the second call that my coworker made to the company.

As it turns out, the elevator stopped short and became stuck because of a "dirty switch" in the elevating machinery. He had it cleaned and ready in about twenty minutes.

All's well that ends well, I suppose.


* - For those of you unfamiliar with Canada's holidays, Boxing Day is a statutory holiday, occurring every year the day after Christmas.

That's awful LadyC, glad you got out okay. But what was the smell!? I was waiting to hear there was a dead body blocking the elevator shaft or something!

I'm so glad that you weren't stuck for longer, although an hour is plenty long enough.
What a terrible experience!

I'm sorry, I never DID find out what was causing the smell. By the time I got out of the elevator I really wasn't overly concerned with odours, and it had pretty well dissipated. It was most LIKELY someone smoking some particularly heinous marijuana in their room, but I never found out who.

No fair enough, I guess I wouldn't have been worried about the smell after all that either!