If you’re driving, Genevieve Fowler, TC ’16, might not come along. “When I’m getting in a car with someone for the first time,” she says, “It’s a hit-or-miss thing.” We’re sitting on the concrete steps outside Blue State. I asked what scares her, and she answered within a few seconds as we watched cars go by on Wall Street.

“I’m a big fan of self-driving cars. You’re definitely less likely to get in a crash,” she tells me. As we continue talking, it seems that Fowler, a mechanical engineering major, trusts gears, circuits, and robots more than people. I found this shocking, given that I was there to interview her about a day in November of her freshman year, when a dinky elevator in Bingham — a different kind of self-driving car — trapped her for an hour and a half.

“But I didn’t do much freaking out,” she told me with a shrug. “I had faith in the engineering of the elevator.” Fowler was less calm, though, about her Math 230 problem set when the elevator car stopped moving. She took a break from the problem for dinner and told her friends not to wait as she grabbed her jacket from her room. She entered the elevator from the ninth floor, alone.

Just before she reached the first floor, though, “the doors just didn’t open,” she told me. She pressed the emergency call button, and the operator told her to hold on for a second. His voice returned, only to tell her the electrician had already gone home for the night. He called the fire department instead.

Fowler waited. She sat down. She texted her worried mom. She posted a Facebook status: “Stuck in an elevator… So hungry…” to which her grandmother commented, “Stay calm. Post results.” She believes the operator heard her talking on the phone with her boyfriend, who she called later, and that the operator must have pegged her as crazy.

The firemen eventually showed up, but the car wouldn’t budge. Since it was stuck between floors, the men had to belay down the shaft from the ninth floor, onto the roof of the elevator, and retrieve her from above. One of the men “thumped” on the roof to get in. It was then, during the moment of rescue, that Fowler felt her only twinge of anxiety. “I was thinking about that scene in The Silence of the Lambs when the body comes in through the top of the elevator,” she said.

With the help of the firemen, she climbed onto the roof of the car, put on a harness and helmet and belayed up the shaft, the rope suspended by what Fowler describes as a “pick-axe thing across the door frame.” Conveniently, Fowler is a rock-climber.

An hour and a half later, she emerged, sans blood and Hannibal Lector. She went to Claire’s to get the dinner she had missed and finished her problem set, wearing the jacket that, in a sense, caused the whole ordeal.

–Graphics by Kai Takahashi