As I told you a while ago, I went to San Antonio, Texas from Wednesday a couple weeks ago to the following Sunday.
I am pretty sure that the trip transgressed all possible thresholds in which one would call it a “bad trip”.
It was a terrible trip.
The WORST trip I have ever been on.
The chaos began when we first got to our hotel.
We were happy to be finally on the ground after about a 3 hour plane ride from Northern Virginia (not to be confused with regular old Virginia). Giddy as we were, my roommates and I failed to notice an obvious yet rather discrete sign stating that the elevator we were boarding was a garage elevator, and only went to the 7 garage levels.
It took us 7 levels to realize this.
To make things worse, someone accidentally hit the emergency stop button, not only causing the elevator to jerk to a stop but also setting off one of the loudest most obnoxious alarms ever. (You think your school fire alarms are loud? Try three times as loud in about 10 sq ft of space (about 3 sq meters)).
I cannot put into words exactly how insane it was in the elevator, but I shall try. Imagine being in a small, hardly insulated oven with a bunch of squirrels. Now imagine someone slowly turning the heat up. NOW imagine the squirrels are going through a crack withdrawal. THAT was what the elevator was like, except with greater urgency.
In a panicked state mostly caused by the ever rising temperature and the imminent fall of the elevators to our deaths imagined by a few of us (and eloquently expressed through yells, curses, and screams) we awaited rescue.
As we got more and more impatient, one of us discovered the “Elevator Service” phone line. We called and asked urgently whether help was on the way, interjected by pleas for help and rescue by one especially panicked passenger. She assured us that they were “working on it” and that we would be out of there soon.
Minutes crawled by, slowed mostly by random bouts of panicked yelling and chattering hushed by yells of “Shut the F**k up!” Soon, we felt that help was not coming, and we called the service line again. We were answered curtly by the same woman who simply said (quite angrily) “We’re working on it!” and hung up. This only agitated our already hostile and unstable state.
After a few more minutes of angry banter we heard a man outside. Everyone flocked to the locked elevator door. “Are we gonna get our?” we yelled, unsure whether or not our voices would carry over the alarm. “Yes, you’ll be out soon enough, don’t worry.” As if that was not enough to calm down some of our passengers, one girl screeched “We’re not gonna DIE are we??”
“No, you’re not.”
The rest of our desperate attempt to help went something like this:
“Can you get us out ok?”
“Yes.”
“Should we press the open door button?”
“NO! Don’t press any buttons!” (by this time he had told us how to turn off the alarm, much of the tension was released)
“Should we pull on the door?”
“Yes… wait… NO! Don’t!” (yelling and nervous chatter)
Finally the elevator proceeded to the next floor and all of our sweaty bodies crushed together to escape the evil elevator, weakly dragging our luggage behind us.
“We’re FREE!” we cheered. Our blissful freedom had been granted us by the elevator demon!
“Where are the stairs?” The what? In our ecstatic and excited state, we had forgotten our motive for getting into the elevator in the first place! We walked up and back around the parking lot until one of our rescuers found us and showed us where they were. We were grateful, because everyone knew we were NOT getting in that elevator again.
We had to carry our luggage down 6 flights of stairs, but we didn’t mind. As long as we weren’t in that elevator.
After the ordeal, all we could think was: “This had be a pretty damn good trip.” Too bad it stayed about as equally as crappy.
I will post the rest of this story separately, as it would be much too long for a human with a normal attention span to get through in one sitting. Be assured, good reader(s) that the rest of the story is JUST as much of an epic fail as this was.
