the twenty fourth

It's been a while, passengers.

I am negotiating the space that separates disgruntled employee and professional who takes nothing personally.

The generosity of most everyone we work for takes the edge off boss-subject relations, but I am nervous about the coming year. If I am to be suspended for reading so be it. It would be a fine reason to be fired. I just don't understand why the boss cannot pretend not to notice.

suspension

It's been a while.

I've been a busy man. When I am not driving an elevator or writing the blog, I do lots of stuff, none of which I will tell you because they might offer clues to my real identity. That and they aren't that interesting and/or incriminating.

The holiday tipping season is in full swing and I will say yes, people are generous. Working for rich people can be kind of annoying much of the time, but this time of year it's all good.

I have a grievance. There is a new manager in the building and he is becoming annoying. He is a nice enough person and he's very good at his job. He made a lot of small changes that were begging to made under the previous manager, and the staff culture has changed for the better as a result.

But he's never worked in a building that had a service staff before- never before in his life has this man worked an 8 hour shift as either a doorman or an elevator operator. No doubt he has ideas about how it should be done, and no doubt the parties concerned with maintaining the tone of the building have given him all sorts of ideas, but the fact remains he has never done it himself.

This is a problem. He thinks he can tell me how to do my job, but he has never done my job.

He catches me reading all the time because he sneaks up on me. Through the back door. He threatened to suspend me yesterday!

necessary maintenance

From time to time I think of quitting my job.

The pros are these: health insurance, a steady paycheck and easy. I know that's not a noun.

Did I mention my job was easy? My job is easy. A child of 8 years old could do my job. In fact, I think there was a time when kids did do my job. The lever goes right the elevator goes up the lever goes left the elevator goes down. People go out people come in.

Easy.

Cons: I don't like working evenings. I want to have a life. I don't like being a flunky. Obsequiousness isn't coming easily anymore. I am way too smart to be a menial, but I can't prove it and no one will give me a chance to do so.

At least the money's good.

Holiday Bonus Season!!!

a doorman watches a winter night fall

the wind makes a constant
whispered scream
in the gap between
the heavy doors i sit
behind
resisting the urge
to paint faces in the fog
of my own breath
on the panes
into which passersby
no longer search
for their own reflections.
i smile and wave.

disclaimer

The Thanksgiving holiday is over and elevator operation is in full swing. All those residents who went to the country for their long weekends are back and the elevator moves up and down with regularity, driven by me, your trusting correspondent.
I say trusting because I am aware that this blog could get me into trouble at work. I am a service employee, and inevitably situations will arise in which people for whom I work will not like what I have to say, or even say that it is not my place to say anything. Although this blog is anonymous, there will be readers of it who will know exactly who I am, and if these people do not like what I have to say, I am sure there will be trouble for me. So while I am sensitive to the fact that at work, it is not my place to say anything, in my own time, I am free to say whatever I wish to, and that the anonymous and voluntary nature of this blog provides an outlet for me on issues that may affect me directly, or on situations where my insight may be valuable to my readers, if not simply interesting. It is not ever my intention to allow this blog to become of the voyeuristic gossipy sort, although there is no shortage of appetite for inside information on the lifestyles of the upper crust. Rather, the primary purpose of this blog is to allow me an outlet for my thoughts and opinions about my work and workplace, and that it is my hope as a writer that my work on this blog will provide a valuable and unique lens through which to view the culture of the city.

Barney Fife

So there was a fire last week up on the tenth floor. Space heater or some such thing caught fire. I was passing through the courtyard on my way out to go home and I was smelling smoke. When I got upstairs I was discussing the smell with my relief and debating whether or not to call the fire department when a fire truck goes rolling past. I flagged them down. They went sniffing around in the basement and waved their flashlights all over and then went up to the roof to check things out, waking up the president of the Co-Op board in the process, and leaving me feeling like Barney F-ing Fife.

Because there was no fire.

gravity's rainbow

Elevator operation on Thanksgiving Day is a total bore. I was bored last night, but someone from the eleventh floor gave me a plate of turkey and stuffing and yams and cranberry sauce, so it wasn’t all bad.
Boredom, and the ability to deal with it constructively, is a big part of the elevator operator’s trade. I sit for 8 hours, near the elevator. When the elevator rings, I drive it up and collect whoever rang the bell. when someone comes in, I help them with their load, if necessary, and drive them up. On a typical working day, I give about 50 elevator rides. Over 8 hours, it works out to one every 7 or eight minutes, but there are rush times, so I can sit idle for as long as an hour sometimes, and then stand in the elevator for ten minutes going up and down and up and down.
But on days like Thanksgiving, all the guests arrive at the time specified, and they all stay up there for hours and hours while we go crazy in the lobby from boredom. The doorman listens to the radio, and I try to read.
` Gravity’s Rainbow is a big important novel by Thomas Pynchon, and I’ve been banging my head against it for weeks now. It’s almost turned me off to reading completely.
It is set in Europe during the last part of World War Two and it’s immediate aftermath. The central characters work in Psy-Ops, and the V-2 rocket looms throughout. There’s lots of weird sex and decadence, and everyone’s paranoid. Slothrop, the American character who the plot mostly follows, was in London for the Blitz, and afterward wanders through Europe looking for some chemical compound critical to the construction of the rocket. Drinking and drugging his way through Paris and Berlin, he meets crazy characters along the way, which unfolds with Pynchon’s perversely playful prose. I worked on it last night, but it’s slow going. It stopped being fun on about page 588. I really just want to see what happens and be done with it, but you have to read the whole thing to know that, thus my frustration.

double shift

The elevator operator is tired. Of using the third person, mostly, although I did work a double shift last night.
A double shift is when your relief calls in sick, and you elect to stay to cover his shift. Otherwise, there would be no one to run the elevator, and some number of people in the double digits would be stranded in their multi-million dollar apartments, or else reduced to using the fire stairs, the exit doors to which are rigged with fire alarms. If tripped unattended, these alarms could spread panic on the Upper Best Side. That simply wouldn’t do.
So I went to work at 3:30 in the afternoon yesterday, and I did not leave work until 7:30 this morning. Now that would be an ordeal if I were working on an assembly line building automobiles, but elevator operation is all about conserving physical energy and remaining at the ready for the chirp of the elevator call. Calls like these are infrequent on Saturday nights, and when they do happen, the caller is nine-times-out-of-ten in a mood of Saturday night jollity and disinclined to notice the elevator operator’s irritation at having been woken from a deep nap.
Last night I could not nap. I dognapped, as distinguished from catnapping by unpleasant waking dreams, which in dogs are manifested by twitching limbs and loud snuffling, but in elevator operators are manifested as feelings of vertigo and acute social inferiority. That and there was no comfortable place to recline.
The Co-Op Board is right to decline to provide facilities on which the doormen, elevator operators, and midnight porter/doorman/elevator-operators might make themselves too comfortable. We are here to do a job, and excessively comfortable seating could very easily distract from the job at hand, and could lead, in some cases, to an overly nonchalant attitude toward the tasks with which we are charged. This was no great comfort to me, however, at 4:00 o’clock this morning as I tried to rest myself against the knowledge that I had to return to work at 3:00 this afternoon. I am making a note to myself that if ever I am reassigned to the midnight shift for a period of longer than a few days, I will invest in a folding camp cot.
The papers came at 6 or so- distributing them took a few minutes, and my relief arrived at 7:15. Home by 8:30, I was pleased to find a Heineken in the fridge, and I had achieved a deep and relaxed slumber by 9.
At eleven o’clock, the music downstairs started. Some music can be heard with the ears only, as from a small radio across the room, or in the distance. At other times, music can be felt in the crown of one’s head and at the finger tips, and tingling on whatever skin is bare to it. Other music is so dense, so bassly impactful, that one can feel it in the liver and in the spleen, until finally, involuntarily, one’s heart is forced to beat in time to it. The third category is the one into which my neighbors, seduced by the modern technology of Big Bass Sound, have pushed their music. I do not know what the melody lines sound like- the melodies are obscured by the walls, and my floor, which in all fairness is their ceiling. I would have to guess by the swooping basslines and 1-5-7 progressions that the music is some sort of folk music; in fact my best guess is that the music is of the Northern Mexican ranchera variety.
I like this music. When it is performed on the L train, I usually put a dollar in the passed black Stetson. My limited Spanish allows me to discern the narratives in the songs encompassing beautiful and universal themes of love and loss, of yearning and pathos, and of triumph and tragedy. What I do not like is the perversion that is made of this music by the Bass Boost and the rhythmic semi-melodic cannon fire which makes sleep impossible. I have talked to the neighbors, but my Spanish is too poor to make any sense of the situation beyond repeated and pathetic begging to bajar el “bass”. Any stereo that powerful must have a graphic equalizer. Yet I cannot make myself understood. My impression of their impression is that I am a cranky and cantankerous spoilsport who hypocritically enjoys loud music himself. I would give a demonstration of the use of the graphics equalizer in increasing one’s enjoyment of the pleasures of melody while reducing the gut-punching impact of Bass Boost, but I fear my efforts would be met by by-now deaf ears. No doubt.
So, here I am. It is 9 o’clock, and with the help of a thermos full of strong black coffee, I will make it through to 11:30, at which time I will be relieved of my duties in elevator operation and make my way home. I do not have to come back here till Thursday.

Elevator operation

Elevator operation is a skill that few young men of my generation have learned. Some of us grew up in small towns, where there were no tall buildings, and thus no elevators. We learned of the existence of elevators in movies, and wondered what that sort of vertical motion felt like. We determined to experience it for ourselves one day. We remember a sexist hick joke involving said hick, withered old bag, bombshell, elevator, and impressionable hick's desire to place his own wife in this magical box. We laughed.
Later we would ride in elevators. Pressing the button to induce motion, and with time learning that the buttons with horizontal arrows had the power to open and close doors on floors , we became confident with these machines. We could move up and down with ease in tall buildings, like the department store in the mall.
Later we moved to the city, and needed work. We found it in telemarketing, copy-writing, trade-show salesmanship and persuasion, confidence games, furniture moving, room painting, and as our condition worsened, sandwich board marketing. We despaired of ever finding work commensurate to our skills and abilities.
We were surprised when we found that work. The Universe was no longer absurd. Elevator operation saved our life. Before our time, before even the time when our mothers and fathers were the daughters and sons of the daughters and sons of failed farmers turned midwest factory workers, there were tall buildings in the big cities in which lived the rich of their time. In these buildings were elevators, but in the time before circuit boards and solid state, there were no buttons. There was a knob, and a lever, and to turn these knobbed levers, there were elevator operators. This was the time of the post-Gilded Age, the only somewhat tarnished Age, the F Scott Fitzgerald age, the age that ignored the Grapes of Wrath, the age that had yet to to turn the Grapes of Wrath into Cold War wine and a car in every driveway and suburbs and factory towns and good jobs for high-school graduates.
The rarefied worlds on the upper sides of Manhattan preserve these elevators- elevator operator is not a retronym; elevator attendants press buttons and are shameless parasites, a leisure class of the leisure class, even if they do carry things sometimes. Elevator operators turn knobs, and these knobs are attached to levers, and these levers open the circuits that run the motors that turn the pulleys that move the cables that lift the cabs that bring the masters of the universe, and their husbands and their wives, and their sons and their daughters, and their guests, and their nannies and their home health care providers, and their housekeepers, and their deliveries of mail, and of communication by messenger of papers too important, urgent, or sensitive to be trusted to the mail, and deliveries of food; both groceries and prepared meals, and wine, and liquor and, and new clothes in fancy packaging, and dry cleaning, and regular laundry, and all other things, sundry and extraordinary, large and small. It is work that is essential to the smooth operation of the city, and we are proud of it. Our skills and abilities are commensurate to its demands.
Yet, sometimes we find ourselves bored. We have decided to keep a blog.