#elevator death

I had the absolute pleasure of joining my friend Tal @starplanes on their show "Someone Dies In This Elevator" @sditepod A spoiler driven anthology series, where there is always an elevator and someone always dies in it - but everything else is different.

Listen to my entry and enjoy!

"Mal-elevate-nt"

LINK: https://pod.link/1560057600/episode/2af27d33d96f2c197876fceb88ff943e

By Chris Buckley, NY Times, March 7, 2016

BEIJING--In a crowded Chinese neighborhood, she suffered the loneliest of deaths.

She was trapped and forgotten in a broken elevator of her apartment building for more than a month before her body was discovered last week. She had a hand pressed against the door, some accounts said.

But now this death in Xi’an--the northwestern city famed for its ancient entombed terra-cotta warriors--has stirred protest and a nationwide roar of anger by people furious that lax building management that can turn trivial acts, like riding an elevator, into fatal traps, news reports and Internet accounts said on Monday.

Hundreds of residents in the Gaoling District of the city, where the woman died confined between the 10th and 11th floors of her apartment building, gathered to rally last week, according to photographs and accounts on Chinese websites. Other pictures were said to be of the police, some in riot gear, lined up against the crowd.

“The management did nothing,” declared one of the banners that the residents held up, according to an image on Sina.com Weibo, a popular microblog site. “She was in the elevator dead for over a month before being found.”

The woman, in her 40s, has been identified in news reports only by her surname, Wu. She lived alone on the 15th floor of the apartment building, mostly keeping to herself, the reports said, quoting neighbors.

But she has gained posthumous fame as a symbol of how lackadaisical residential management, a widespread complaint in Chinese cities, can become far worse than an inconvenience.

Two repairmen turned off the power of the elevator on Jan. 30, after it malfunctioned, according to the reports, quoting police investigators and district officials. They shouted to check for anyone inside, heard no reply, but failed to follow rules and pry open the doors to make sure. They left the elevator unrepaired for more than 30 days. Ms. Wu’s body was found last Tuesday.

“What if the management staff had gone to look inside the elevator before shutting off the power? Would this tragedy have happened?” asked a newspaper published in the eastern province of Zhejiang. It was one of dozens of newspaper and Internet commentaries lamenting the accident.

“Unfortunately, in this society, there are too many what-ifs,” it said.

Ms. Wu’s death in solitude came after two public deaths last year on faulty escalators in Chinese shopping malls, when unsuspecting passers-by were dragged underneath into their machinery. Those deaths were recorded on video monitors, and the footage ignited widespread anger that simple mechanical maintenance had been mishandled.

Top 5 Ways I Do NOT Want to Die in NYC:

5. Getting injured and then slowly dying alone in my studio apartment

4. Getting pushed off the edge of the top floor of the Guggenheim (actually this is kind of badass)

3. Having a fire escape ladder fall on my head

2. Getting pushed into a subway