Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
As 15 minutes of fame go, this one pretty much sucks.
The 34-year-old New York production manager was working late one Friday night in October when he went outside for a smoke. He was returning to his office on the 39th floor when the elevator stopped abruptly between floors. White pressed the alarm, letting it ring and ring. But at 11 p.m. the building was deserted, and it would be nearly two days before White was rescued. He paced around the elevator like a bug trapped in a box, fighting claustrophobia every minute of his 41-hour ordeal, which was captured on a video surveillance camera.
More details are at the link but it's the video, all 41 hours sped up into 3 minutes, that's fascinating.
Did he try to set off the smoke detector? He had smokes and a lighter.
Posted by: Chopper at April 22, 2008 02:24 PMWhere did he go #1 and #2? Or did he hold it for 41 hours?
Posted by: Spike at April 22, 2008 09:27 PMIt has occured to me that the modern cell phone blows a big hole in many classic plots, including "I'm trapped, I can't get out, and no one knows where I am." To tell a story set in the 21st century, you either have to find a new and different plot or specifically take the cell phone out of the picture--and the latter can look clumsy.
(Example: Ballard's Concrete Island--were it written in 2008, Maitland's mobile would have had to be forgotten at the office or get lost or broken during the crash, or he'd have had to have specific reasons for choosing not to own one--and the regret of not having one would be in his head for the rest of the book.)
Posted by: Dirty Davey at April 22, 2008 11:06 PMYou could just have the cell phone not have been recharged recently, and when our hero pulls it out to make the crucial call, he finds the batteries are dead.
Posted by: Clownæsthesiologist at April 22, 2008 11:44 PMAm I the only person who has found that cell phones often don't work in elevators?
Posted by: bitchphd at April 23, 2008 12:21 AMWhat really sucks for that guy (based on the excellent New Yorker article) is he apparently went mildly nuts after his ordeal, and was never the same again. He lost his job and is currently unemployed.
Posted by: Gaijin Biker at April 23, 2008 01:43 AM5: He pulled the doors open and urinated down the elevator shaft, sez the article.
Posted by: apostropher at April 23, 2008 02:03 AM8: no; if you're in a sealed metal box at the core of a reinforced-concrete structure, mobile phones can have a tricky time getting a signal.
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/01/strangers_conve.html
Posted by: ajay at April 23, 2008 06:12 AMRe: "You could just have the cell phone not have been recharged recently..."
...is exactly what I meant by: "specifically take the cell phone out of the picture--and the latter can look clumsy".
If you have to create a short episode--Joe forgets to plug in his cell phone--for the sole purpose of making the cell phone unavailable at a later point in the story, that's kind of clumsy.
9: I think the author of that article read Moby Dick one too many times. Constantly interrupting the narrative with a lesson on whale biology was annoying in Melville's time and it's annoying today.
Posted by: Ashley at April 24, 2008 04:20 PM