HOW TO TALK TO AN ELEVATOR
As a small child I was fascinated by the lever that controlled the manual elevator of that era. A uniformed matron would expertly drive the elevator car, manipulating that lever with a gloved hand. I marveled at the elegance of her ability, by merely flicking the lever quickly back and forth, to deliver the car to its perfectly level position at any designated floor. I practiced being an elevator operator on the window handle in the back seat of my dad’s Buick.
Riding an elevator has to be one of the most trying, most dismaying of social encounters. It can seem like a moment lifted from Sartre’s No Exit, which can be summed by his phrase: hell is other people. There is no comfort in an elevator. At best its duration may not be prolonged, it runs smoothly and quietly, passengers are not oppressively numerous, being exposed as an object to others may be mitigated. And, of course, the site where elevators are present effects the overall ambiance. There is a distinct difference between an elevator in one’s apartment building and elevators in anonymous locations.
National Talk in an Elevator Day (the last day of July) offers this nostrum: Human beings are social animals and we must interact with others in order to develop and learn more about ourselves and the world in general. Do we indeed? Elevators are not conversation pits. They are the antithesis. Talk in an elevator perverts its purpose, its milieu and its ambiance. The elevator is a conveyance apparatus, first and foremost. That multiple passengers may find themselves confined therein creates an accidental social nexus, an actual nexus event.
Therefore talk in elevators has become a recurrent, quotidian issue. Does one initiate a conversation or merely emit a statement that might be taken as a verbalized thought, such as: It’s quite cold outside. Or one might direct a comment to another passenger: Do you live/or/work here? Hearing someone speak out in an elevator creates a crisis for the listener: do I respond and if I do how do I direct my response: do I open a wider discourse: Yes I live/or/work he, what about you? Or: yes it is cold, time to think about winter.
There is always the choice not to respond. Regarding the speaker, one quickly, even thoughtlessly, measures characteristics about the interlocutor: do they appear dangerous/uncouth/socially invasive/attractive/benign. Always, either as potential speaker and listener, one’s personal character is pulled into focus: am I shy and therefore silent; does silence evoke discomfort that speaking out will dispel; the opportunity to engage with a stranger offers the possibility of a social experience, even a new friendship.
Time, in an elevator, is always a limiting factor. And dialogue cannot extend beyond the period of conveyance, interrupted by one or the other passenger(s) departing at their floor. These ultra brief encounters further cast a special qualification around whatever talk occurs. Whether in relief at their ending or, perhaps, or dismay that they will not continue. Engagements with strangers are potentially fraught social events, but elevator talk runs from benign and as far as to terror.
What happens when one finds oneself in an elevator with someone one has encountered on that same elevator numerous times before? Here the social pressure to talk vies with the discomfort of sustaining a pattern of silence that may be read by others as indifference, rudeness, or momentary discomfort like sharing the use of public toilet.
To those who must use elevators daily, certain methods of avoiding or engaging in elevator talk no doubt form a part of their elevator behavior and social etiquette. Such seasoned, regular elevator users will have acquired a repertory for dealing with these adventitious encounters.
In the background of elevator chatter, silent or expressed, is the implicit danger of catastrophe, which talk will often mitigate. But the possibility of being stuck in an elevator or treated to a malfunction such as an uncontrolled drop of acceleration frames every elevator experience to extremely variant extent. But one has placed one’s physical being in the robotic hands of a moving machine, much like in a vehicle or a plane.
That kind of danger invokes in elevator talk a varying degree of comfort, of masking the awareness of that hidden, only incipient physical vulnerability. Talk of the maintenance of steely silence both replace awareness of an indifferent entrapping machine with an encapsulating social presence.
National Talk in an Elevator Day provides a kind of solace. Elevators are for talking. And forget everything else.
