The Sum of All Fears

From an article entitled “Up and Then Down,” by Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker‘s issue of April 21, 2008:

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

White would be stuck in the elevator for 41 — forty-one! — hours. A “security” camera captured his entire stay in the Hotel Car 30. Afterwards, he managed to obtain a copy of the tape:

He has watched it twice — it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

Here’s the video, the whole 41 hours viewable in about three minutes:

This situation — surely the stuff of fiction, somewhere — brings together a whole handful of nervous-makings.

There’s clautophobia, obviously — which according to various authorities is* the closest term we have to “fear of elevators”: fear of enclosed spaces. (This differs from claustrophobia in that the latter, apparently, is fear of tight spaces, whether or enclosed or not.) If he even noticed it, White might have been driven to distraction by the security camera (scoptophobia, you know: fear of being seen or stared at).

And then there’s triskaidekaphobia: the fear of the number 13. Why triskaidekaphobia here? Also from the New Yorker piece:

At a certain point, [White] decided to open the doors. He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13″s — one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black. It was a dispiriting sight. He concluded that he must be on the thirteenth floor, and that, this being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft anywhere for many stories up or down… He peered down through the crack between the wall and the sill of the elevator and saw that it was very dark. He could make out some light at the bottom. It looked far away. A breeze blew up the shaft.

He started to call out. “Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. “Help! Is there anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while.

If he’d really thought about it, of course, he might not have worried about the 13th floor so much as the elevator car number: 30 (triacontaphobia).

He did get hungry, of course, but all he had on hand was a couple of Rolaids. Yet he had second thoughts about consuming them, “which he worried might dehydrate him” (xerophobia).

As time went on, White opened the doors to have a pee. (Paruresis: the fear of urinating in public — “shy bladder syndrome.” Or maybe it was plain old urophobia — fear of urine itself.) He had some matches and considered dropping them down the shaft but thought better of it. He just thought it might start a fire (pyrophobia); he wasn’t worried about setting off an alarm, since he’d already pressed the emergency button to sound the alarm bell in the elevator… which apparently rang the whole time he was stuck inside. (He considered shutting it off at one point, then thought better of that, too.) Which brings us to kampanaphobia — the fear of bells — or maybe just to simple ligyrophobia — the fear of loud noises.

White himself didn’t fare well at all after finally getting out. His co-workers thought he’d been slacking, and taped some sort of ugly message to his computer screen. (Probably inducing logizomechanophobia, the fear of working with computers.) He did, for the time being, go back home (obviously not a nostophobic, someone afraid of returning home). There he was beset by the media, and never went back to work at Business Week. He filed a $25 million lawsuit but ultimately had to accept much less, “barely six figures.” (Liticaphobia: fear of lawsuits.)

Finally, “He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed… He won’t blame the elevator.”

Still, he probably wishes he could turn back the clock — or maybe not, if he’s ever considered the dangers of retrophobia (fear of traveling back in time). No word on whether he now fears working (ergophobia) altogether.

Naturally, elevator mishaps always put me in mind of the white-knuckle opening scenes of that Keanu Reeves flick Speed — the scenes which took place pre-bus, pre-Sandra Bullock. After reading this story, though, I’m not sure I want to see it again for a long time.

Just tachophobic, I guess.

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* I’m not an authority, but the Greek word for “elevator” appears to be asanser. Which, if true, might make asanserophobia the fear of elevators.