Death by elevator

I was talking with friend as I was leaving work today. As per my normal routine I decided to take the elevator down to the main floor. Apparently there are stairs but I'm not quite sure where they are. Anyway, I my friend and I boarded the elevator, joining 5 other people from other floors of greater altitude. The elevator door shut, as it should have, and then suddenly the elevator dropped one foot then came to an abrupt stop. The door opened while the elevator was beeping and I could see that we were about 12 to 18 inches lower than the sixth floor. Then the door shut, dropped, I'm guessing, about another foot, the elevator began to beep again and the seven of us sat in a stopped elevator for about 1 minute. In elevator time 1 minutes is equivalent to ho long 1 minute of wall sits seem to be. After 1 minute the elevator began to move in a normal fashion again and all passengers were delivered unscathed to the lobby. Well one lady might have had a little bit of an anxiety attack, but I'll never know for sure.

As a result I thought, maybe I'll start taking the stairs, then I found out that you need to have an access card to even enter the stair well because they don't want vagrants spending the night in the building. Which by the way happened a couple of times last week. Some guy was spending the night in the mens bathroom on the 17th floor. I don't think he was doing any harm, just a little hard on the nose and eyes from what I was told.

Long story short, you never know when the elevator your riding in could send you into a 6 story free fall and either give you a cool war story to tell or possibly cripple you or end your life.