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Memoirs
of a Visual Man
The only elevator in Borland Lab is located at the far end of this hallway. It is a cage elevator that looks as if it were installed sometime during the Coolidge administration. On this particular day, I had to do both a film showing and a TV/VCR delivery on the first floor of Borland Lab. I went up to the second floor and down the dark hallway to the A/V storage closet. I got the TV/VCR unit out first and wheeled it down the hall to the cage elevator. I hit the elevator call button, and waited until the elevator cab came before opening the swinging door that protects people (and spiders) from falling down the elevator shaft. I placed the TV/VCR cart inside the elevator and went back down the hall to retrieve the film projector from the A/V cabinet. While I was back at the A/V cabinet, someone--maybe a spider, maybe someone with half a brain--entered the elevator and, without questioning why a TV/VCR unit was sitting alone in there, took the elevator cab up to the third floor. Not knowing this, I returned to the elevator pushing a film projector and speakers on an A/V cart. I opened the elevator door and started to shove the A/V cart into the elevator cab--only there was no elevator cab. I managed to grab onto the side of the cart and stop the whole thing from plunging down the elevator shaft, but the front wheels of the cart went over the edge and the cart tilted forward. Carried by momentum, the film projector, which was resting on the top of the cart, lurched forward, sailed over the edge, and tumbled down into the darkness below! I watched it disappear down the shaft, and heard a deafening crash of machinery parts as it hit bottom. I caught a brief glimpse of the cylindrical projector lens as it bounced up to the first story, then fell and hit bottom again with a horrible crack that echoed up the shaft like a gunshot. For a few moments, I stood on the edge, staring down into the abyss, breathing hard, and in a cold sweat. Then I pulled the A/V cart back onto solid ground and took it back down to the A/V closet which, fortunately, had a spare movie projector. I took the spare projector back to the elevator, called the elevator cab (which still had the TV/VCR unit sitting in it), and went down to the first floor, where I completed both of my A/V assignments for the day. I never told my supervisors at the A/V Department that I had dropped a movie projector down the elevator shaft in Borland Labs--it wasn't the kind of thing you brought up in everyday conversation anyway. And a few months later, when the elevators in Borland Labs had to be shut down because maintenance crews found that parts from a smashed movie projector were jamming the gears at the bottom of the shaft, I claimed to know nothing about it. |
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