I complied passively, and moved toward the closed doors of elevator "E," which at the moment was on some other floor. I experienced some mild annoyance as the doors to elevators other than "E" opened with a beep to let their passengers on or off. To make matters worse, there were building attendants in the lobby directing traffic, as if we were all too stupid to recognize the first five or six letters of the alphabet. Another elevator opened, and for a moment the thought "screw it, I'll just take this one" crossed my mind; but as I moved toward this open elevator that was not "E," I beheld a most distressing sight: a little display on the inside of the elevator's doorway, placed there no doubt to prevent naughty little passengers like myself from doing what I was about to do, informed me that the elevator in question that was not "E" was programmed for that particular run to stop at floors 11 and 20 exclusively. Since I was bound for floor 10, not 11 or 20, I moved back toward the doors to elevator "E" with a woebegone schuffle.
Before long, elevator "E" arrived, and I boarded the elevator eager to be about my business on the tenth floor and then to beat as hasty a retreat as possible from the building with these conveyors of denigration. Upon entering the lift, I met with a second surprise, this one even more nauseating: The console with all the buttons I was used to pushing, the one into which I had absently poked commands times before, had been covered by a metallic box. They didn't just remove the console and replace it with something useful like a mirror, or at least made the area blend in with the rest of the wall. No, they slapped on a large, obnoxious, unavoidable protrusion about the size and shape of a large Fed Ex box. There it hung, bolted there as if to mock me, as if to say, "oh, the buttons are still here. They haven't been removed; they're now within my shiny gold plated confines, safe and sound. But they're not for you, nondescript, unimportant person. We command your destiny now. Content yourself that we are taking you to your destination, and worry yourself not with the details." A small key lock toward the bottom of the box, it too seemingly placed prominently, as if to taunt me, served as a rueful reminder that somewhere within the building, at that very moment, some BIG SHOT with the key could have accessed those buttons if he wanted to. Oh, yes. He could.
I arrived on the tenth floor and realized that I had really wanted the eleventh floor.
After an abbreviated reenactment of the humiliating ritual I was on floor eleven. At least I'm still allowed to open the frigging office door, I thought, as I entered the foreordained suite. I picked up the documents for which I had come, and I couldn't help asking one of the young ladies in the office what she thought of the new elevator system. Much like myself, she despised them. She couldn't say for certain whether the cars came or went faster or not, she (like I) simply knew she hated the assigned rides.
I walked back to the bank of elevators and obediently typed the ground floor as my destination in the console. One other fellow waited in front of our assigned door. I also asked him for his impression.
"They work okay," he said, "when everybody does what they're supposed to."
When everybody does what they're supposed to. When nobody hops on an elevator they didn't request, or gets off at a floor they didn't name as their destination. When nobody demonstrates an iota of free will, but instead docilely shuffles in and out of his or her preassigned cattle car.
There's no other way to put it: these elevators piss me off. I mean, I realize that whether I punch a destination into a console in the lobby or once ensconced in the car itself, it is I who pushes the button and who determines his end point. And 99 times out of 100, I am not going to veer from the course charted, by me, at the beginning of my ride: If I type 10th floor, I (usually) want to go to the 10th floor. But that little loss of liberty, illusory or otherwise (hey, what if I suddenly and randomly decide that I want to get off at the 7th floor as I'm halfway to 10?) is an irritable bridge too far. Am I never going to ride those elevators again? Hardly. But they piss me off, just the same. Am I going to do anything about it?
No. That's the honest truth. As William F. Buckley pointed out in his magnum opus "Why Don't We Complain?"
we are all increasingly anxious in America to be unobtrusive, we are reluctant to make our voices heard, hesitant about claiming our right; we are afraid that our cause is unjust, or that if it is not unjust, that it is ambiguous; or if not even that, that it is too trivial to justify the horrors of a confrontation with Authority; we will sit in an oven or endure a racking headache before undertaking a head-on, I'm-here-to-tell-you complaint. That tendency to passive compliance, to a heedless endurance, is something to keep one's eyes on -- in sharp focus.
I think the observable reluctance of the majority of Americans to assert themselves in minor matters is related to our increased sense of helplessness in an age of technology and centralized political and economic power. For generations, Americans who were too hot, or too cold, got up and did something about it. Now we call the plumber, or the electrician, or the furnace man. The habit of looking after our own needs obviously had something to do with the assertiveness that characterized the American family familiar to readers of American literature. With the technification of life goes our direct responsibility for our material environment, and we are conditioned to adopt a position of helplessness not only as regards the broken air conditioner, but as regards the over-heated train. It takes an expert to fix the former, but not the latter; yet these distinctions, as we withdraw into helplessness, tend to fade away.
And I, I'm afraid to say, am very much a creature of the times. I will not shake my tiny fist at the building management/politburo that inflicted this insulting, demeaning elevator system upon the tenants--who keep the management/politburo in BUSINESS, for crying out loud-- and visitors of the building. Irrespective of whether bitching about it would lead to any change or not. Americans don't bitch for the sake of bitching anymore, at least not those of us who are too busy working and getting on with our lives to take the time. (People denied their Popeye's Chicken are another matter).
And this trend is disturbing to say the least. We're used to getting screwed, and we just don't get that bothered about it anymore. For example: A friend of mine told me that a surefire way to kill Obama's "public option" health care bill would be to draw attention to the fact that the politicians won't have to take this plan for themselves. My response: Are you kidding? We know they're going to carve a sweeter deal for themselves. We know there are two sets of rules. That doesn't even phase us anymore.
I am heartened, however, that we as a people are demonstrating that there is a length to wish you can no longer push us without us swinging back. People are not sitting still and allowing the liberals in Washington to take our health care away. We murmured at the bank bailouts. We snapped a bit at porkulus. We started to shout after Cap and Tax and now that they've come for our health care, we are shaking the rafters with our voices. It took a while to wake us up, but we appear to be awake. For now.
Compared to that, an annoying elevator system is obviously small potatoes. But it's not minuscule potatoes, if we're going to allow 10,000 microscopic little encroachments to back us, over time, into an ever shrinking corral. I would rather be a nation that sends back our steak if it's overcooked rather than one that gradually relinquishes its freedom for the sake of politeness. Come to think of it, I think I will bitch about those elevators.
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