The Elevator Problem

Consider the lift.

It is eleven floors tall and it is going down. You are on the ninth. There are five other people inside it, none of whom you know, all of whom are facing the doors, as is the custom. The doors close. And you become aware — with the particular clarity that arrives only when escape has just been ruled out — that something is going to happen, and that it is going to happen here.

You now have approximately nineteen seconds.

The four courses of action

The literature recognises four. They are not equally good, but they are equally famous, and every adult has attempted at least three of them.

The first is total suppression. You hold. You hold with the whole body. Your posture becomes that of a man reading a very interesting notice on the wall of a lift that does not have a notice on the wall. Suppression is admired by moralists and by nobody else, because suppression does not solve the problem. It relocates it. The problem will be waiting for you in the lobby, in the revolving door, and — statistically most often — in the eight seconds you spend saying goodbye to a colleague on the pavement.

The second is the slow release. The connoisseur’s choice. Executed correctly it is inaudible, and it converts an acoustic problem into an atmospheric one, which is to say it converts a problem with a suspect into a problem with no suspect at all. This is the whole of its appeal. It is also the reason it is considered, in every serious treatment of the subject, to be the coward’s manoeuvre — you have not avoided the crime, you have merely destroyed the evidence of authorship while leaving the evidence of the crime standing in the middle of the room, in front of six people, for the remaining fourteen seconds.

The third is the sacrifice. You get out. Floor seven, floor six, it does not matter; you step out of the lift as though seven had been your intention all along, you walk with purpose towards a corridor you have never seen, and you take the stairs. The sacrifice costs you four minutes and your dignity remains entirely intact, which — and here is the mathematics of it — is an extraordinarily good trade, and almost nobody makes it, because at the moment of decision four minutes feels enormous and dignity feels free.

The fourth is honesty, and we will come to honesty.

Why the lift is the hardest case

Every difficulty of the form is present in the lift at maximum concentration.

The volume is small; there is no dilution. The company is unchosen; there is no goodwill to draw on. The duration is fixed and known; there is no possibility of waiting it out. And critically — this is the point most often missed — everybody in the lift is facing the same direction. Nobody can see anybody’s face. Which means the ordinary social machinery for resolving these things, the machinery of the raised eyebrow and the shared and forgiving glance, has been disconnected. You are six people, in a box, in the dark, morally speaking.

The lift is not a difficult venue. The lift is the control condition against which all other venues are judged, and this is why every anecdote you have ever heard about this subject takes place in one.

The tragedy of the lift is not the nineteen seconds. It is the four floors of silence afterwards, during which everyone present privately concludes that it was somebody else, and one person knows.

The case for honesty

It is our position, advanced without much hope, that the fourth option is the correct one.

Say it was you. Say it immediately, plainly, without the nervous laugh, and above all without the explanation. “That was me. Sorry.” Nine words fewer than you want to use. No mention of lunch. No mention of a specific restaurant. No theory about the milk.

The effect is remarkable and it is very poorly known, because so few people have the nerve to test it. What happens is this: the room’s problem is no longer a mystery, and a room can forgive an event far more easily than it can forgive a mystery. A mystery must be solved. Everyone in that lift, given a mystery, will spend the descent quietly investigating it, and their investigation will consider each of them in turn, and they will not stop when the doors open. But an event with an author attached is simply a thing that occurred on a Tuesday, and by the lobby it is over.

Confession does not make you the person who farted in the lift. Confession makes you the person who owned up, and those are not remotely the same person, and only one of them is remembered.

A closing note on the stairs

We would be failing in our duty if we did not say the obvious thing.

Take the stairs. Not afterwards. Not as penance. Take them at the start, before the doors close, before the problem exists, on the general principle — applicable well beyond this subject — that most of the truly unbearable situations in a life are ones we could have declined to enter, four minutes earlier, at almost no cost.

But you will not take the stairs. Nobody takes the stairs. That is why we have a journal.