So.

Riding the elevator to my apartment.

La-la-la-la-laaaaa...(That's an impression of me, riding the elevator. Or really doing anything at all.)

Suddenly!

Chunk-CHUNK.

Half the lights go out. Buttons light up at random on the push pad thing. The elevator stops.

*sigh*

I push the emergency button, and the first guy I get misinterprets my assurance that I'm not hurt, just stuck, as saying that I'm fine and everything's fine, and he hangs up on me.

Second guy efficiantly gets my information and says he'll call security on my building (which isn't very reassuring, because most of them don't speak English well at all, and some of them are pimply and young; I secretly hope the middle aged man with the cop-moustache is on duty tonight). (He wasn't.)

Okay. So I pull out my cellphone for something to do.

It's dying.

Okay. I'm in a mostly-dark stuck elevator with my phone dying.

I rummage in my purse, looking for something to do, and ah-HA! I find my mag-light.

I turn it on.

It, too, is dying.

So, I'm sitting in a mostly-dark elevator, with a dead cellphone and a quickly dying flashlight.

And then all the lights go out, and the fan stops.

Holy CRAP.

I'm poised, ready for face-munching zombies to pry open the elevator doors and try and taste my succulant flesh (I begin to darkly suspect at this point that the spiders in my room are in league with the zombies).

Anyway, nothing happened, and I quickly got bored and stiff of my ninja-esque pose (which was actually more like me peering through the crack in the door and poking my fingers in the gap), so I sat on the floor and sang Queen songs and snippits of musicals for a while.

Then I got bored again and tried to take a nap, but there was strange clicking overhead, as if someone was stealthily taking my picture.

I flip them the bird, just in case.

FOREVER passes. I decide I will be stuck in the elevator forever. I wonder if I will be stuck all night, and whether I should just fluff my toque, use it as a pillow, and go to bed.

I've almost decided that's a good idea, when I hear people, and someone knocks loudly on the elevator door.

A flashlight (one that isn't dying, and probably isn't being held by a zombie, unless that zombie is a cop-type-figure).

"I can't tell if the doors are still powered. Can you open them?" he says.

"I'll try," I said, and wedge my fingers into the crack and, just like the amazing Hulk, I turn all green and start smashing things.

Okay, not really.

The door slid open with embarassing ease.

"Well," says the man on the other side, "that was easy." The security guy is hovering behind this man, looking nervous and a little confused. His face is on the pimply side.

"Why didn't you do that in the first place?" asks the security guy, still looking confused.

"Uh," said I, avoiding talk of zombies, "because I didn't want to fiddle with something I didn't understand."

The elevator technician thinks this is a pretty sane idea (I'm glad one of us does). "Better safe than sorry, eh?"

They asked me a few questions about what happened, and then let me wander off to my apartment. The hallway, which is always grimly under-lit, looks positively festive after the dank darkness of the elevator.

And now I can't sleep, because of the adrenaline (admittedly from only a mild fear of plummetting to my death; I reassured myself by thinking of worse ways to die, and was pleased to discover I could think of quite a few).

So, instead I write a haiku to being stuck in the elevator:

Stuck in the damned lift
While face-munching zombies prowl.
Queen will scare them off.

Before&After