Elevator Acrobatics

The lifts in this country have been notorious since before Mr. Otis can remember, but in the seventeen years that I've been visiting and five since I've been living in Armenia, I'd heard all the getting-stuck-in-the-elevator stories, but never once had actually fallen prey to the phenomenon.

Until today, that is.

I won't go into the details, but, suffice to say, there were five of us going into a building together, with a lady already in the rather spacious lift. So, up we went, but the doors refused to open, one floor after another. Finally, after numerous tries and many minutes, we asked the lady, who lived there, to call the good people at home to give us a hand. The men caught us in between the eighth and the ninth floor, and explained the situation to us.

We were too many, and the elevator is apparently not used to handling such weight. So, what do we do ? There were a couple of handlebars running each side of the elevator, and we were told to actually lift ourselves up, exercise our arms and balance our bodies when the thing came to a halt. For an arguably Orthodox country, this was, quite factually, an unorthodox solution. But, of course, it worked!

Now, I was never brilliant at physics; I actually flunked the subject at school. However, unless I'm much mistaken, the weight within the elevator didn't quite change by three people heaving themselves up, now did it ? It was lovely to try one's hand at gymnastics in a dank shaft in the middle of Yerevan (I like doing things I've never done before, and would never have imagined I'd get to do), but the logic behind it escapes me.

Thankfully, we escaped the lift, and lived to tell the tale. However, this place called Armenia remains an enigma yet. It's so lawless, even the laws of physics refuse to be applied...!