Dear Diary:
Rien
Nothing happened today. It was grand — until now. Now, I wish that something had happened today.
In the late afternoon, I ran a few errands, involving multiple rides on the elevator. On each of these rides but the last one, the elevator stopped at the third floor. Nobody got on; nobody got off. The last time it happened — and I fancy that this is why it didn’t happen again — my eye was teased by the ghost of a darting wraith, while my ear was tickled by a shriek of glee. Although I didn’t want to get the little ones into trouble, I stopped at the doorman’s desk to report the evident infraction. If you’re going to play with the elevators in New York City, pushing buttons just for the fun of it, you need to know the consequences — before they involve lynching.
You probably think that kids love to play with elevators, but that’s not true. Elevators are pretty boring, really — that’s why we grown-ups like them. What kids are playing with when they play with elevators are the adult passengers. The kiddies on the third floor would have given up the game in two minutes if there hadn’t been hapless old folks (twenty and up) looking a little confused, wonderring if they ought to hold the doors for someone in a hurry. Those of us who can remember being eight years old endeavor to pretend that this sort of thing happens all the time. Otherwise, you’re playing right into the kids’ hands.
Older children, the ones who suddenly find themselves on the hither side of puberty, are fond of pushing all the buttons on the elevator. This always strikes victims as totally dumb as well as unspeakably malignant, but it’s a move worthy of Sartre. By making people who have somewhere to go stop pointlessly at floor after floor, a teenager imposes the tedium of his or her miserable existence on all the humbugs who are delusional enough to think that, just because they’re paying a mortgage and getting laid on a regular basis, they’ve got their act together. Ha!
This is why there is no elevator-game theme park in New York City. You’d never be able to sign up enough adult victims to keep the patrons interested.
My mood here, at The Bank Too Big To Fail, can be summarized in a word : Grrrrrr. And then there are the children in my building. Is there a typeface high enough to express the Grrr I feel about them and their parents, the doublewide strollers, the sense of entitlement? Go back to the suburbs! Go back! Get out of our elevators! Teach you damn children manners!
The couple down the hall have a child who makes me want to mimic Jack Nicholson and Verdell and oops, down the chute. Totally spoiled. And now that he has a sibling, forget it. And so on a Sunday morning about 9:15 there was about 10 minutes of screaming in the hallway and finally I stuck my head out to see the father sitting on the floor outside the apartment door calmly lacing up his boots while the evil seed screamed and carried on.. I asked if there were something wrong. He looked surprised and said no. I said then I wondered why there had been so much screaming so early in the morning and shut the door.
So much for the neighbors. But my building used to be virtually adult only and now we are over-run. But as of yet the little darlings have only brought in an infestation of bedbugs, not the push the elevator button flu.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr