721: The Walls Close In
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. There's this thing that happens in the first episode of the TV show Watchmen, which I finally saw last month. I'm behind. A woman is driving with her son on a sunny day, and suddenly the sky darkens, and squids drop from the sky. Like a hailstorm or something, but they're little squids. Each one, I don't know, they're going to be a finger. Cars on the road pull over and wait. Squids land on them and on the ground, making the soggy waiter of squid on the road. And then soon enough, again, like a hailstorm, it stops. Son comes back up, everybody starts a car again, heads to wherever they're heading, just like the most normal thing in the world. No big deal, just another squid drop. And when I saw that, I felt like that is exactly how things happen. Like, that's how things feel. That's what everything feels like right now. Inconceivable stuff goes down all the time these days. And it's like, you can get used to anything. You know what I mean? Every few days, more Americans died from COVID than died in 9/11. Wildfires are raging and continue to just rage. The president won't disavow white supremacists in a televised debate. Like, I'm used to all that, like that since daily life, you know? Or there's this example of you can get used to anything. Jay was having a normal stressful day for 2020, meaning he does his job from his apartment on a computer at his kitchen table on Zoom. But he's also, you know, got to deal with his children during the workday. So a couple weeks ago, he's a college professor and he's preparing a lecture for a class and he's anxious about that and he wants it to be good. And then at three o'clock, he has to go run, get his kids and bring them home. And he and his kids get back to their building at 320. And he's trying to move quickly because his class starts at 330. And he and his two kids get on the elevator to head up to their apartment. And then all of a sudden, I feel the elevator start to drop. It's like a, you know, a half second feeling like when you're in a roller coaster. And, and thankfully it stops. How far do you guys drop? I don't know, just probably a couple stories. You dropped a few stories. Yeah. And I look and it's stuck at the third floor. They push you back into call for help. And they're told somebody's going to be there to fix things, but it's going to take a little while. And they wait. And my kids are starting to bicker with one another. And my daughter starts getting upset. She's eight years old. And part of what's happening, Jay says, is that her big brother, who is 10 years old, has actually been stuck in an elevator once before when he was little. So he's being, oh, what's the big deal? He was not rattle at all. And in fact, she starts to get upset. He starts to tell her that she's overreacting and that makes her more upset. And so I had to like calm her down and tell him to stop teasing her. And then we took a couple selfies and we, you know, I tried to like make it like a fun thing. We're all going to remember and look back on and laugh on. And so that kind of changed the mood in the elevator a little bit, at least briefly. So kids momentarily, okay, Jay gets back to the other urgent matter that's on his mind, his class. It's over 300 students, this big intro psychology class, which still has not started. There's still just enough time for him to quickly tap out a message on his phone. Dear class, I'm currently trapped in an elevator in my apartment building. So join the zoom call and start teaching once I'm safely out of here. Push send, message goes out, and then nothing, right? They just stay put. And Jay starts to worry about his students who are waiting for him on that zoom call. 10 minutes past, 20, and half an hour in, he decides he's going to try to teach the class on his phone from the elevator, which takes a little like technical wrangling. He has to download zoom to his phone with barely one bar of service, blah, blah, blah. Okay, this part is boring. But after a while, okay, no video, voice only, he's in. And I joined the zoom class and I'm trying to talk to them and I can hear their voices and the students are all chit chatting with themselves. And I can hear them kind of speculating about what might be happening to me and they're laughing. And I'm trying to get their attention and they're all talking and they couldn't hear me. And so I'm shouting at this
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