The elevator operator in modern literature

There are four writers I can think of who used elevator operators in their work- John Cheever, P.G. Wodehouse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Kurt Vonnegut.

In "The Startling Dressiness of a Lift Attendant", a "Jeeves" story from Wodehouse, Bertram Wooster gets a flashy pair of socks, much to Jeeves' dismay. Later, Bertram becomes involved in a sticky situation, as is his wont. Jeeves extricates him, as is his. Therefore, Bertram can voice no objection when the elevator attendant, speaking in a Wodehoustian take on "Negro" dialect, thanks him for his generosity in the gift of the lavender stockings, which, if I remember correctly, he lifts his trousers slightly to display. He is a comic character, but his freedom to wear the flashy socks denied Bertram by his valet hints at the tension between a supposed freedom to play the peacock in the more "primitive" black elevator man, and the restraint, enforced by Jeeves, that the aristocratic gentleman Bertram must display. This is the Jazz Age. Analogies can be made to hip-hop, but I haven't got the time.

In The Great Gatsby, "a reluctant elevator-boy" (one is unsure if boy refers to his age, or to his social status) is sent to fetch milk for the puppy bought on a whim by Mrs. Wilson, Tom Buchanan's mistress. He is described as taking "initiative" by adding dog biscuits to the meal of milk. Later, as Nick Carraway descends the elevator drunk with Mr. McKee, who is even drunker, the elevator operator (again called a "boy") snaps at McKee "Keep your hands off the lever." McKee denies the knowledge of having touched it, but McKee is drunk and we are unsure of his intentions, as ellipses trail off to McKee in bed, clad only in his underwear, with Nick at his side. I once took a class that read heavy subtext into the interactions immediately preceding and within the ellipsis. I am content to the read the ellipsis as an ellipsis.

The Cheever story is that of an elevator man who must work on Christmas. He courts the sympathy of all his passengers, and the resulting gifts of food, but especially, drink, leave him satiated and drunk, unable to do his job. He is summarily fired. Many aphorisms are appropriate to this situation, but the one I choose is Be careful what you ask for- you may get it.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's narrator, who vaguely is Vonnegut, recalls an elevator operator whose remains he'd come across in the course of his work as a newspaper reporter in Chicago after World War II. The man got his wedding band caught in the workings of a landing door somehow, and he was maimed, then crushed by the machine he was driving. I cannot visualize this. The narrator (Vonnegut,) recalls telling a stenographer how horrific the sight was, to which she replied that she'd seen worse in the war. How Vonnegut hated war. I wonder what his life as a writer would have been had he not experienced the war so intensely.

As far as I can tell, no literary or sub-literary work has been narrated by an elevator operator, nor- with the exception of the Cheever story, whose protagonist is unsympathetic and seems one-dimensional- have they appeared as more than tangential minor devices off which are reflected the characters, the protagonists. What sort of writer would use such a character as an elevator operator as a narrator? What sort of experience would inform the life of such a writer?