The office was boiling hot and I already felt somnolent in the afternoon sunshine. The meeting had been called to discuss a forthcoming contract for lift maintenance. I was a reluctant attendee, wheeled in because I knew something about the law of contracts. The walls of the room were painted in a blackcurrant colour. I felt as if I was inside a bottle of Ribena. When I saw that we were to go through a lift maintenance agreement line by line I was horrified. It looked as if there was to be an afternoon’s work in store, in suffocating heat. I hate lifts. I won’t use them, I won’t step inside one for fear of being stuck there for days, with no oxygen and nothing to eat. Yet here I was, poring over a lift maintenance agreement that was so turgid it made ‘The Encyclopaedia Brittanica seem like a holiday postcard. The young lift expert was garrulous, enthusiastic. He positively thumped a tail when he discussed lifts. I thought perhaps he’d been born in one on the way to the hospital, so great an affinity he had with them. His card read ‘Senior Lift Consultant.’ I bet myself that he had started out his career as ‘Junior Lift Consultant’ and worked his way up, floor by floor, rather like one of his lifts. The lift expert revealed that not every lift had a lift-counter, which was necessary in order to record the number of times the lift went up and down. He made it sound almost a capital offence. He said that circuit boards were a problem and I said they often were. He insisted on calling ‘call-outs’ ‘call-backs’ until I reminded him of the correct use of English. We spent twenty minutes attempting to define the word ‘negligence’. He told me what a ‘time-constrained defect’ was and I told him I was glad to know. We discussed LG Tests, without him once explaining what the acronym ‘LG’ actually meant. He gave me a detailed explanation of what constituted a single-storey platform lift. I learned why it is vital that lift maintenance contractors must use the lubricating oils recommended by the manufacturers. I learned about hydraulic and traction lifts, landing-door locks, modular-based maintenance of lifts, screeds of lift regulations drawn up by successive governments, codes of practice and codes of conduct, regulations and bye-laws relating to lifts, and the need to have routine maintenance built into a contract, but not repairs to fixed portions of lifts. In the end, I came to know almost as much about lifts as Mr Otis himself. The lift expert’s mobile telephone rang. His eager face positively beamed in delight.
‘Crisis,’ he said. ‘There’s a Schindler four-three-two-zero acting up in a multi-storey across the city. It’s an entrapment. I have to go. Right away.’
‘An entrapment?’ I enquired, mildly interested.
‘Someone stuck. I’ll have her out in an hour,’ he replied.
He galloped out of the office and I gathered up my papers. I envisaged the poor woman, staggering from the lift, half-dead with fright, and the first words she heard would be ‘I knew it - a faulty circuit board causing a modular overflow, leading to a sustained jerk outside the design parameters. Bingo – an entrapment.’
I almost felt sorry for her.
