Taking the stairs for fun and fitness and also so you never have to drink your own urine.

Did anyone else see this story in the New Yorker about the guy, Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours? Just sit back for a second and think about the last 41 hours, and the ways in which they would have been different if you’d been trapped, alone and without food or water, in a 6×6 space. Uh, that’s a long-ass time.

Luckily for us, the entire ordeal was captured on the building’s security camera. So if in your quiet moments you’ve ever wondered what a person does under such circumstances, now you can find out, thankfully not in real-time. Here’s the link. It’s amazing how gripping it is to watch someone just pace around at super-speed and lie on the floor for hours at a time. Definitely watch it.

For people who are too busy and important to read the entire accompanying article, here is a bulleted list of the things we all want to know:

1. He pushed the doors open and peed down the elevator shaft. That was my number-one question, of course.
2. He didn’t have his cell phone with him.
3. He had three cigarettes, which he smoked, and two rolaids, which he did not eat.
4. It was over a weekend, so no one noticed that the elevator was not functioning. He pulled the alarm, but no one heard it. Apparently several security guards came and went and didn’t notice him on the security camera.
5. It was an express elevator to the 39th floor, and he was trapped somewhere around the 13th floor, so even if the escape hatch hadn’t been locked from the outside there would have been no way for him to climb to safety. It was just a concrete shaft for hundreds of feet in both directions! Shudder.
6. Eventually someone either noticed him on the camera or friends came looking for him (unclear in the article), and he was released.

I was emailing with my buddy who alerted me to this story and thinking about how I would react under similar circumstances. The New Yorker article said that White had the idea in his head that he wanted to be a ”model employee,” even under these extreme circumstances, so that’s why it took him so long to smoke his cigarettes or try to climb out the escape hatch. I thought that was kind of notable. I feel like I would panic immediately. It’s amazing that I don’t freak and go into survival mode when the elevator’s just moving normally between floors.

I’d be trying to start a fire and catch mice for sustenance within three minutes if this happened to me. They’d pry the doors open 10 minutes later and find me clothed in some sort of mouse-pelt loincloth, with a half-chewed piece of carpet in one hand and a urine cocktail in the other.

And fine, that’s not actually a picture of John McClane in an elevator shaft, but you get the idea. It’s just a visual reminder of how awesome that was. Actually, I wouldn’t be eating mice! I’d be climbing around the elevator shaft in a tank top and bare feet trying to kill Alan Rickman! Maybe after dementia had set in, anyway.