Elevator

New Year’s Day is supposed to be a joyous time of celebration, of families and best friends sitting down to unending snacks and kids getting away with stuff because mom and dad just might have slight hangovers from all that partying the night before.

Let me set the scene for you. On January 1, 2012, our family was spending the weekend on fabulous Blue Mountain (www.skibluemt.com) and boy we were planning to do some serious skiing and snowboarding to ring in the New Year. But that darn old global warming: instead of the heavenly white powder we dreamed of, we got hellish doses of brutally cold winter rain.

Our disappointment would be like the Queen of England finding only faded cut off jeans and bleach-stained hoodies in her closet to wear to the coronation of her son as Prince.

So what do you do if you’re a 7th grader with six friends, you’re hanging out in a mountain hotel and it’s raining so you can’t go skiing?

Hey, us boys were bored. Really bored. There is a true story in a New York Times’ best selling book about how someone made the catastrophic mistake a few years ago of turning seven bored teenage boys loose on the 3rd floor of a ski resort hotel. We’re talking 2.6 million dollars in damage — plus one missing boy and two boys in full-body casts for 8 months.

No, that wasn’t our crew, but we did cause quite a fuss, and wait till you hear this one.

So we’re bored — have I mentioned that we were 7 teenage boys terribly, frighteningly, hideously bored on the 3rd floor of a hotel on New Year’s Day?

First we ordered pizza — what did you think we’d order, escargots and salmon bisque? We wolfed down the pizza in our hotel room and set out for some adventure — having not the slightest, vaguest notion of the misadventure we were about to be involved with.

We jumped in the hotel elevator, there was pushing, slapping and shoving. Typical adolescent stuff. But when one of the boys hit the wrong button on the elevator control board — YIKES!, SOMEBODY HELP U.S.! We were stalled. Stuck. Trapped for THREE HOURS!

Now picture this: we weren’t just 7 teenage boys in the midst of typical adolescent hormonal growth spurts and edginess. Two of us were asthmatics and another was ADHD (that’s “attention deficit hyperactive disorder,” in case you just arrived from Siberia last night).

Putting 7 boys in a hotel elevator and forcing them to stay there is bad enough — it is really, really ugly, in fact, and it smells bad right away — but adding asthmatics and a hyperactive kid to the mix, it’s like stumbling into a 20-gallon tank of jet fuel with a lit blowtorch. Boom.

Still with me? So there we were. We sent text messages to our folks (who had just been seated in front of an expensive, luxurious meal at Oliver Bonancinis), which caused no small amount of panic. Speaking of panic, can you spell C-L-A-U-S-T-R-O-P-H-O-B-I-C? Typical American kids don’t relate to claustrophobia until they’re stuck in an elevator with 6 sweaty teenagers.

Speaking of sweaty, it was so hot in that cramped elevator for 3 hours, we were forced to strip down to our underwear. Pretty gnarly, the? We might have been busted for indecent exposure if the cops could have gotten to us. Four of us were par-boiled — the other three were poached. Our brains were fried when the fire department finally arrived and got us out of there.

The moral of this story is, don’t EVER get into a full elevator — especially not one with 6 or 7 frustrated teenage boys who can’t go skiing because it’s raining and they just polished off huge slices of pizza and a gallon of coke. And don’t Google “What to do when you’re stuck in an elevator” because those people are clueless. “Desist from jumping up and down in the elevator with the aim of getting it to move,” writes Cristiano Ronaldo on www.securityworldnews.com. Yeah, right Christiano. Next time we’ll remember that. Have I mentioned my New Year’s resolution yet? One Guess.

Works Cited

Blue Mountain. (2012). Ski Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains / Blue Mountain Ski Area.

Retrieved March 31, 2012, from http://www.skibluemt.com.

Ronaldo, Cristiano. (2012). Do’s and Don’ts When you are Stuck in an Elevator. Security World News. Retrieved March 31, 2012, from http://www.securityworldnews.com.