Boxed

Not game related, but it happened while I was playing a game—Street Fighter Alpha Anthology, specifically—so it more or less counts.

About an hour ago I got an IM from a friend who, like me, is quite claustrophobic. Rather than explain, I offer this (brief) copy of our discourse:

rob: dude dude DUDE DUDE DUDE
me: DUDE
me: what?
rob: i'm about to ruin your fucking weekend

He sent me a link, which led me to the following YouTube video:



Holy god damn, he wasn't kidding. The video and the harrowing New Yorker article it accompanies reveal the 40-hour confinement of Nicholas White, a production manager of Business Week who was returning from a smoke break when the express elevator crapped out. Though eight security guards took note of White via surveillance monitors, nobody guessed that he had been stuck for two days.

Movies about prisons, especially the ones that feature "the box" or "the hole" or some other form of close-quarters solitary confinement, those things absolutely terrify me. But here's the benefit to getting locked away for a week: You're aware of how long you're to be locked away. Sure, you might lose track of time, but at least someone knows you're there. At least you've got a place to sleep, water to drink, the footsteps of other souls outside your door. The things you take for granted, right?

But I'm much too lazy to let a little something like the abject terror of such a fiasco keep me from using elevators—thinking about that goddamn video every time the doors slide shut, though, is another story.

Incidentally, the cartoons in that magazine are the most awful goddamn things. It's like they took on a life of their own and decided to destroy humor forever.