Elevator Safety

My “to do” list just got one more thing added to it.

It’s not my fault, either. I didn’t break anything or neglect to take care of something.

It’s all because I read an article on the internet – not on any of the rabble-rousing sights, but just on the home page for Charter, our local service provider.

It seems that that the newspaper carrier for Sherwood and Carolyn Wadsworth, 90 and 89 respectively, of St. Simone’s Island, Georgia, noticed that their newspapers were piling up. When a package that’d been delivered the day before wasn’t removed the paper carrier called 911.

When the police broke into the house, at first they didn’t find anything amiss. Even the cat was there.

Then they noticed that the house had an elevator. Most home elevators look like a closet; if you don’t notice the call button, you probably wouldn’t know what it was. When they opened the elevator they found the couple in the car, stuck between floors. They had apparently died of heat exhaustion in the unairconditioned elevator.

There was no telephone in the elevator.

So what does this mean to my “to do” list?

Well, it just so happens that our house has an elevator in it. One that’s a whole lot older than the one in the Wadsorth’s house, I suspect, given the tax values of property on St. Simone’s Island. It has a telephone in it that was added in the early 1980’s, after Mr. Miller found himself trapped in there for several hours. I happened across the guy who installed it after Mr. Miller found himself trapped in there for several hours one day.

So we got a telephone, right? No problems.

Well, except for the fact that like so many other people, we’ve cut the land lines. The phone in the elevator is little more than a wall decoration. It didn’t really matter anyhow, because since we went digital through the cable company before we got rid of the landlines all together, and a digital telephone system is apparently the arch-enemy of a rotary dial phone.

I knew that there needed to be something done even before the newspaper article. A couple of months ago, the kids that help me out and I were moving some stuff down to the basement and I told them to climb on and just ride down.

They were hesitant at first; after all, it doesn’t look anything like an elevator they’ve been on before. There’s a metal collapsible gate that you have to close before you close the door to it. It creaks and makes funny noises when it moves.

For some silly reason, they trusted me and did what I said.

Of course, the elevator immediately got stuck. It hadn’t had any glitches in months, and THIS is the time it chooses to get stuck.

Of course, there’s no phone. My cell phone is on the kitchen counter downstairs, so I can find the darned thing when I need it.

Fortunately, one of the boys had his cell phone in his pocket. We tried to call the guy who lives in the apartment, who’s primary language is Spanish.

Ever try to get “go to the basement and get a screwdriver and bring it to me in the elevator, where we’re stuck” to pass through multiple language filters, not to mention my increasing irritation?

Thankfully, the boys are bilingual. Even then, we had a hard time getting the message across, probably because of vocabulary limitations.

Once we pried the door open a crack and passed the screwdriver through, it was easy enough to take the cover off the little control box and reset it. They’re not complicated, thankfully.

But it drove home the fact that we need a telephone in there. That had slipped off the radar, not at the top of the “gotta do it this weekend” list and the solution was to simply implement a safety rule – don’t ride the elevator unless you have your cell phone in your pocket.

It’s too easy to slip, though, and the article about the Wadsworths have driven home the need to address this particular safety issue. So we’ll be figuring out a solution, probably just wiring my office phone into that system so it’ll work in the elevator.

It’s just another thing on my “to do” list.