The Bad Lift

Every morning, I take Bus 92 from Place de Marechal Juin to Charles de Gaulle Etoile. From there I take the RER A to La Defense. Every morning, I buy a couple of freshly baked pain au chocolat for breakfast.Every morning, I rely on probability to give me a sign of what the day holds for me.

I am not superstitious, merely bored. You see, we have three lifts in our building. Two perfectly fine ones and one that looks like it has been gutted and was a scene in some Terminator movie. With its wires hanging out, and its the flourescent lights (that were supposed to illuminate softly, hidden behind a steel panel),  open to the world and starkly visible on one side of the elevator thereby making everyone look older and even more tired than usual. The walls were covered hastily in a sickly green carpet, as if that would make it look any better. I wonder what they were hiding. A printed out sign, in Times New Roman, tells the story of the elevator, ‘Attention…’ it says. Since the rest is in French, the story is lost to me.

Every morning, if the first thing I get is The Bad Lift, it’s a sign that the day will be interesting.

This morning, I took the Bus 92 from Place de Marechal Juin to Charles de Gaulle Etoile. From there I took the RER A to La Defense. This morning, I bought a couple of Pain au chocolat for breakfast. Freshly baked.  This morning, I relied on probability, and the odds were against me. I got the bad lift.

I said I wasn’t superstitious, so I ignored that little signal of doom. I don’t believe in bad luck anyway. It was a busy day workwise, but that was normal. There were guests so I had my usual awkward social situations with them. Normal. I had a web conference, and that went fine, except that it was generally a waste of time. But that’s normal too.

It was almost the end of the day, so I decided to go to the toilet first to pay homage to the throne. I had to get out of the office, since the toilets were just outside, in front of the Lifts of Fate.

I do my thing (number 1 ok =P), and flush. As I turned to get out the door, my security ID flew off it’s loose case and landed straight into the flushing toilet. It circled a bit and disappeared. That was the longest flush I’ve seen in my life. My horrified eyes could do nothing but watch it go down. Drowned, gone forever, to the sewers of Paris.

Outside the toilet doors, the Lifts of Fate watched on. Tomorrow is another morning.