9/11 and my fear of tall buildings

Yes, everyone knows what today is, but even if you'd been hiding in a cave for the last five years like, well, erm, like a terrorist leader for instance, then you would have noticed that in the last seven days the TV companies have had a glut of documentaries, drama-documentaries and outright fictional accounts of what went on in New York five years ago.

But one thing offers a crumb of comfort to me,
I could not have been in the World Trade Centre on the 11th September 2001, it is just impossible.

You know the feeling when you are watching a dramatised account of what those poor people went through, you sit there in your nice warm living room with a nice cold beer in your hand and your mind wanders and you find yourself saying things in your head like "I'd have evacuated the building immediately, stuff the announcements telling me to stay at my desk".

But I know for a fact that I would never have been in that situation to start with.

Because I hate lifts, elevators, ascenseurs, call them what you like, I hate them.
Which is a bit of a drawback if your office is on the 102nd floor.

And unlike other people with phobias I know exactly where and when my one started.
It was at Leeds College of Technology circa 1975.

My first lesson on a Monday morning was at 9am on the fifteenth floor of the college.
The college had two lifts for something like 1000 students to be elevated to their classrooms at every start/finish/break time.
And each lift held exactly 15 students.

Not one more than 15, and sometimes a few less.
I don't have to describe the scene on the ground floor of the college at 8.55am every Monday morning with every student in the building trying to get into a lift do I ?

You'd stand there outside the lift door in a crowd of several hundred, glancing around you thinking "we won't all get in this one" and then with a "ping" and a groan of sliding doors the lift would arrive and you'd be forced through the open door to find yourself rammed against the back wall of the lift...and you'd wait.

You'd wait until someone near the front could shove enough people back out of the lift until there was a clear space for the doors to close...and they'd press the buttons to select a floor, in fact they'd press all of the buttons, they'd press them all individually and then they'd press them all together at the same time, but to no avail.

There above our head would be the big red sign that flashed out the word "OVERLOAD" with a smaller sign below it that read "Max load 15 people", and you'd glance around the rammed full lift and you'd count at least forty bodies in there and without the aid of the technology degree that sooner or later you were hoping to obtain at the college, you'd just know that 40 people is too many for a lift that wants to take just 15.

And the stupid thing is that some of the students who were stubbornly refusing to leave the lift in the vain hope that the mechanics would somehow change their mind and take all 40 of us in one go, were actually trainee lift engineers.

So you'd stand there for a few minutes and then someone, probably a trainee lift engineer, would mutter, "some of you will have to leave" and the ones at the front would mutter "fekk off" back to them, and everyone would shuffle around a bit as if shifting their weight by a few centimetres would alter things.

And the stand off would continue, and continue, and continue, until eventually enough people near the front had lost their patience and stormed off to the staircase, probably the ones who only needed to go to the first floor anyway, and after enough of them had alighted the lift would suddenly reconsider its obstinancy, turn off the OVERLOAD light and close the doors to a resounding cheer from us intrepid passengers.

And then someone would shuffle one inch to the left and the OVERLOAD light would come on again and the lift doors would open and we'd be back to square one, to a round of resounding groans and "who fekking moved ?"

So we'd all shuffle around a bit more to redistribute the weight again, and the light would go off, the doors would close....and we'd start to move ever so slowly upwards, cables and panels groaning and straining to take the weight of 23 students, 7 of whom shouldn't be in there, all of us trying to stay absolutely still so as not to trip the OVERLOAD again, and then someone would move and we'd stop mid-floor and the doors would open to reveal a concrete wall and everyone would moan and boo and we'd all start shuffling our feet around again until the lift changed its mind.

Half an hour later we'd arrive on the fifteenth floor, late for lessons - again - and having read every piece of graffitti on the inside of the lift shaft onthe way up, clearly the lift doors were fairly superflous pieces of equipment as the college lifts spent more time inside the lift shaft with the doors open than closed.

And it was all repeated again at lunchtime and again in the evening, it was actually quicker by ten minutes or so to use the staircase than to go anywhere in the college lifts - and so was born my irrational hatred of lifts and the not so irrational fear that whatever lift that I am in will open its doors mid floor somewhere leaving me to stare at a concrete wall with "Janice Ecclesly shags Gordon Barmpot" written in blue biro across it.