Personally, elevators stress me out. You’re essentially forced to stand in a confined box with strangers for a prolonged period of time, awkwardly avoiding eye contact. Then you have to decide who should walk out first, and of course you wait for them to go, but then they also wait for you to go, and then you both go at the same time. Elevators suck, but they do occasionally provide a funny story or two. Or, if nothing else, an awkward elbow-boob graze.
Dominic Lounds is a senior Art major in Timothy Dwight College, a friend of mine, and a generally preposterous human. Nina Johnson, JE ’15, is a fellow senior and frequent cohort of Lounds. When I contacted them this past weekend about the “funny/weird stuck-in-elevator story” that they’d told me they had, I very quickly realized that it was not a stuck-in-elevator story at all, and that, in perfect Lounds and Johnson fashion, they had managed to mire themselves in an even more precarious situation.
In a Facebook message for the ages, Nina explained to me this wonderful tale. “So, if I remember correctly, there were maybe five of us there, including Dom. I think three of us had gone to explore the stacks a few minutes earlier (freshmen brand new to Yale, excited and all). And on that visit to the stacks, someone had ridden in the book lift thing for a floor maybe. Dom wanted to try.”
“This was freshman year, and I was trying all the things,” said Lounds, as we chatted in her single in TD. “They were gonna send me down and then send me back up.” But when Johnson went to wait upstairs, the dumbwaiter, and Lounds, didn’t appear.
Lounds was curled in a ball, trapped in a small metal box, alone in complete darkness. “There wasn’t even a window I could’ve gone out of. It was like the basement of the stacks. I couldn’t do anything for myself. I was just there.”
But Lounds remained composed. “I was thinking about how I’d pee.” Johnson and Co., on the other hand, panicked. They thought she’d gotten caught. Or lost. Forever.
Eventually, they figured it out. Lounds emerged from her dark, tightly-confined isolation, hardened but unfazed. “It was probably no more than five minutes, but it felt like a really long time,” she said.
Upon being asked if she had any advice for future students who may find themselves in a similar situation, Lounds provided a rather insightful reflection: “Elevators, you have to go into. Dumbwaiters? You don’t.”
–Graphics by Kai Takahashi