Terror on the 29th Floor

I work on the thirty-third floor of a forty floor office tower. I have to take an elevator to this floor everyday. Several times a day, in fact. Here's a confession for you: I hate to take elevators. I hate taking them more than I hate taking the train to work at 6:45 in the morning. They're small, they're crowded, they are suspended by a thread hundreds of feet off the ground, and they are electrical equipment and it has been my experience that electrical equipment fails.

Today the unthinkable happened. There was a failure. I got in on the ground floor. I pushed the button. The other people pushed their buttons. The doors closed. The doors opened. The doors shuddered closed. The doors opened halfway and shut again. The alarm went off. It sounded like robotic laughter. The guy standing nearest to the buttons started frantically jabbing at the buttons, he gave them a dirty look that only a lawyer can muster. The elevator started going. The alarm stopped. The lawyer laughed nervously and said the elevator knew what was good for it, that it knew the screaming was next. We stopped at the twenty-ninth floor. A guy got off. The doors closed. The doors opened. The doors shuddered halfway open and shuddered closed again. They started freaking out. The alarm went off (still sounding like robotic laughter). I started freaking out. The lawyer started freaking out, frantically jabbing buttons. The lights went out. Someone said, "Oh Shit." The lights came on. The lights on the button panel remained off. The lawyer frantically hit the "door open" button over and over. Nothing happened. I watched him. The alarm continued. Someone suggested we use the emergency phone. The lawyer hit the button. THE DOORS OPENED!!! We exited the elevator in a hasty fashion. The ordeal was over. It had lasted five minutes. The lawyer was visibly shaken. Unfortunately we had to wait for another elevator, as the doors are locked inside the stairwell. We would have had to walk down twenty-nine flights of stairs and take another elevator all the way up. We pressed the button. The elevator opened it's doors and laughed at us. We sent it downstairs and called another one. It's doors opened. It was filled with people. We started toward it, when a courier jumped up from the back and hit the "door close" button. The lawyer flipped out, and was screaming at the courier as the doors shut and the elevator left. We called another elevator. It was empty. It took us straight to our floor. We got out and breathed a deep sigh of relief. The lawyer stormed past the reception desk and said he was calling maintenance. I'm glad that's not where I work.

I was telling the other receptionist about the ordeal, when I heard the laughter of the elevator. I turned around, in time to see a smallish Asian man stumbling out. He yelled to us over his shoulder as he hurried away, "I think there's something wrong with that elevator."