The elevator operator sat on a stool inside a cage and he pulled a lever and the cage went up. That was the job. Pull the lever. Stop at the floor. Open the gate. Close the gate. Pull the lever again. The elevator operator did the same thing five hundred times a day and he knew every person in the building by the floor they pushed.

The elevator operator knew who was having an affair. He knew who was drinking. He knew who came home at three in the morning and who left at five. The elevator operator was a vertical bartender. He heard everything and said nothing. The ride from the lobby to the sixth floor took eleven seconds and in those eleven seconds people said things they would never say on the street. The elevator was a confessional that moved.

The good elevator operators could stop the car exactly at the floor. Level with the hallway. No step up no step down. That took years to learn. The lever was not a button. The lever was an instrument. Too much and you overshot. Too little and you stopped between floors. The elevator operator played the lever like a musician plays a note. The precision was invisible. That is the definition of mastery.

I knew an elevator operator in a building on Fifth Avenue who had been running the same elevator for forty-one years. He started in 1928 and he was still there in 1969 when I visited a friend in the building. Forty-one years of pulling a lever and opening a gate. He said he liked it. He said the building was his instrument. He said every building sounds different and this one sounded like a cello.

The automatic elevator killed the operator. The button replaced the lever. The door replaced the gate. The automatic elevator is faster and more efficient and it does not need a stool or a man or forty-one years of practice. But the automatic elevator does not say good morning. The automatic elevator does not know your name. The automatic elevator does not stop the car level with the floor because it does not care about the gap. The gap is your problem now.

See also: Walk-Up, Ice Man