How many times have you stepped in an elevator and wondered for half a second what might happen if the door didn’t open? Or am I the only one who does that? Anyway, fear of that happening evidently isn’t as irrational as one might think. Meet Nicholas White. In 1999 this BusinessWeek production manager “went outside to smoke a cigarette and, upon returning, got stuck in an elevator. For 41 hours.”

Talk about traumatizing! Here is the sped up security tape of his ordeal, during which you can watch him go through various stages of disbelief, denial, escape planning, sleep, and over and over and over…opening the elevator door only to see a brick wall, until his eventual rescue.

I am not sure which would be worse: being trapped by myself and having to go through it alone, or being trapped with someone I didn’t particularly like. I suppose 41 hours of forced contact would allow you to work through almost any issues.

But what I really want to know is…was he peeing down the elevator shaft when he opened those doors? Yeah, I went there.

From the New Yorker article:

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

Source: The New Yorker via Gawker