The answer of keeper

Now that I have an ARC and a paycheck, I was trying to scramble to leave work to get to a Honda dealer to look at buying a car. I'm stuck in this expensive daily rental until I buy my way out of this situation. I first checked the rental place as some people at work have gotten really good deals on buying a long term corporate rental from this guy's fleet. He sent me th roster and they have some great deals on Corollas with 100k mileage but I'm looking for something newer. I hears stories of people getting lucky and scooping up a 5 series or Lexus for cheap but you have to be in the right place at the right time.


Then I get a reminder from my dept. secretary that we are having a meeting of our entire division at 9:30 and everyone must be punctual. My experience is, the Taiwanese are never punctual. Not once has anyone showed up for an appointment on time. But, OK, I'll be the first one there and then wait 5 minutes for everyone else to trickle in late. I had read that being fashionably late is not part of Taiwanese culture. Pfft...


To top it off, I then get a letter from HR that as a "new hire" I need to make some personal introduction in front of the entire company tomorrow. Grrrrreat.


And when you thought it just couldn't get any worse, nor more bad movie cliche, I grab my stuff and go in to the elevator and as it arrives at the first floor it just stops. Door doesn't open. At first I thought, maybe it's still moving. And I waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing.


So I hit the button for the second floor. Elevator went up. Bell went "ding". Door didn't open. Unlike my company in the States, here they are more into standardized start/top times. 9-6. Back in the States it was very staggered by job function with people starting the day anywhere from 6-9:30A. But here, there is a mass exodus around 6-6:30. Luckily we have two elevators since one was now dysfunctional but even so, my elevator was now being called floor to floor. It would go to the floor but the door would never open. I wonder what the people thought on the other side.

At one point it seemed stationary on the first floor and I tugged on the door a bit but some automatic voice came on and admonished my in Chinese, maybe. All the elevators talk here, FYI.  So I pressed "this emergency call button for the answer of keeper". Th keeper didn't speak any English but I was hoping that he at least realized that whatever I was saying, it was coming from the elevator, and that something was probably wrong.


When I was in college, we had this "science tower" and the top floor was a posh lounge that was used for entertaining and fundraiser events and such. There was a key hole in the elevator that allowed access to the "7th floor" and my roommate heard that if you are between floors and you rip the elevator door open and trigger the safety mechanism bringing it to a halt, you can then shut the door and select the button #7 and a glitch in the matrix will then give you access and send you up. We just had to try it and sure enough, it worked! Then some idiot who isn't me decided he had to turn the light on, at night, and some security guard a half mile away saw it and came up and busted us. He relayed some Barney Fife story to the Dean of Student that got translated as, we climbed into the elevator shaft and were "surfing" on top of the elevator cabin. WTF?!?! We explained to the Dean that we cracked the code for the magic 7th floor and were sitting on the sofas flicking the lights on and he actually thought that was kinda cool. The next week he got arrested for soliciting a male prostitute and he was never seen or heard from again, but I digress...


Point being though, I'm not afraid to rip open the door of a moving elevator, been there done that. So not willing to entrust my freedom to the keeper, I got it to pause at the first floor and just clawed my way out of there. I was standing in the doorway to prevent the elevator from taking off so someone else didn't get stuck and was trying to get the attention of the security guard at the desk. Then the keeper came around the corner and realized that I was the stuck guy speaking English. I tried to convey to him that he may want to perform some routine maintenance or check on the elevator so someone else doesn't get suck but the language barrier was way to thick and he wasn't that concerned about people getting stuck in elevators. I don't know what other function he has in our building.

I made my way home and then up to the Honda dealer by MRT. I showed up at 8:15 and there were several employees in there but none were willing to sell me their product. Sales ends at 8:00. I don't understand why people are paid to man a desk of a company that sells cars but they are not willing to accept revenue. I can't see what other revenue they are generating for Honda but such a thing is no surprise in Taiwan. Maybe they are the elevator keepers. It's probably all for the best anyway as I wasn't on any sort of lucky streak today and buying a car in this state is probably not a good idea. So I settled for some teppanyaki chicken and a TB at the market. Sat next to a dog.