Woman rescued from stalled elevator. Visiting journalist saves her...but earns her undying enmity

Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while will remember a post I did a few weeks ago about the constant power cuts in Beirut. In that post I speculated what it would be like for someone to be caught in a stalled elevator during a power cut. The other night, I came face-to-face with it.

My friend May had invited me up for dinner and we'd just finished a truly delicious chicken and rice dish that she had  made. I was just about to leave, and May was out of cigarettes (May is eternally out of cigarettes!), so we were just leaving her 8th floor apartment together when everything suddenly went pitch black. Time for plan B. We grabbed a couple of tiny keychain flashlights and headed down the dark stairs. A bit like descending into a mine with only two tiny points of light as guidance.

A few floors down we started hearing banging coming from somewhere. Another floor and our tiny lights fell upon a woman and a small boy standing by the elevator. The boy was sobbing, while muffled calls came from the elevator.

It turned out his grandmother was stuck between floors in the elevator.

May went to work calming the boy while I went into problem-solving mode. Meanwhile, other tenants arrived and started milling about in the dark to no particular effect. Then, the wife of the conceirge arrived, bearing a somewhat larger light and an enormous pair of wire cutters. This was apparently the only tool in their possession that might be of help.

So far, things were looking quite unpromising. As I accumulated data, they got worse. First off, the elevator had come to a halt exactly halfway between floors. This meant there was no climbing down to the lower floor because the drop would have been dangerous for a healthy adolescent, let alone an elderly grandmother. On the other hand, climbing out to the upper floor was going to require a ladder or some other aid. If the person was elderly or had disabilities getting the door open might only be the beginning of the solution.

Things got worse. Elevator doors have simple latch locks that can be opened with a pretty basic key in case of emergency. But you have to have the key, and at first it seemed nobody did. Then, suddenly, someone turned up with one. We happened to be on the lower floor at that point and the triangular key exactly matched the door lock. Of course, that wasn't the door we needed to open. We rushed upstairs, only to dicover that somehow that door had a very differently shaped lock!

At this point we were all milling about rather uselessly for a few minutes. We seemed to be completely stymied by someone's incomprehensible decision to use different locks on different floors, not to mention someone else's incomprehensible decision not to supply proper keys to the tenants, for whom this danger is a nightly event!

But 'problem-solving' is my middle name (and a weird one it is)! And, just a few days before I'd done some electrical work in May's apartment to get a ceiling light working again.  And at that moment I recalled that I'd seen a pair of pliers among her tools.

The two of us trooped back upstairs in the dark and the humid heat, fished around til May found the pliers, then made our slow way back down.

With the pliers in hand, it was - as P G Wodehouse would have said if he'd been with us - a matter of but a moment to force the lock and open the door. Someone brought a folding chair which we passed down to the trappee. Using that, she was just able to reach high enough to get a grip on us and slowly work herself up and out.

Then I had the worst idea I've had in days, if not hours (I have them quite frequently). The sight of this women fighting to extract herself from a stalled elevator in the dark, illuminated by only a few flashlights, was so striking and so emlematic to me of everything that's crazy about life in Beirut that I grabbed my camera and prepared to take a picture.

What I failed to noice was that she was dressed in her 'housecoat'. Which, for her, might as well have been her underwear. She looked up just as she finally managed to get onto the floor...and saw my camera pointed at her. Even in the dark I could see the look of horror come across her face.

Two days later she was still talking about the foreign journalist who took pictures of her in her pyjamas. Hearing that it was him that had opened the door so she could escape only mollified her partially. To refer again to Wodehouse: she may have been somewhat less disgruntled, but she was very, very far from being gruntled.

Even more ironic: I failed to manipulate the camera quickly enough, because I only had one hand free. Thus, I never got the picture I was trying to get before she looked up. Had I gotten it, her face wouldn't have shown up, anyway. And thus I have no picture to add to this post!