Weirdness on the elevator
As I left work today, I had a very odd encounter with someone I can only described as an Unhinged American.
First, some relevant background. I work on the fourth floor. To leave my building, I have to take the elevator down just one flight to the third floor, which is connected to the parking garage. This quirk of my building's design is a frustration for other elevator passengers coming from the upper floors, almost all of whom would prefer to make the trip down to the ground floor uninterrupted. Yokels like me make the car stop twice.
As I stepped onto the elevator, there was a man who was coming from one of the floors above. He was going down to One. I stepped onto the car and pressed Three.
He was staring at the ceiling panels. "You know, they say in the towers, that the jet fuel came through and burned all the steel? And that the jet fuel was what made the building collapse."
My first thought was: huh?? The guy wasn't your typical weirdo. He was an older man -- probably about 55 or so, dressed in a knit polo shirt and slacks. He had gray hair and wore glasses. He looked at me, wanting an answer to his statement.
"Right. Well, it was a lot of jet fuel." Fortunately, the doors opened. I was out the door before I got the sentence out. Grandpa Creepy followed me.
"This isn't the ground floor, sir," I said, smiling.
"They say the jet fuel is what caused the building to burn? But I saw that tower in Spain, the one that was as big as the World Trade Center, and it burned all night and I saw it -- the steel frame is still there. They want us to believe that the gasoline is what brought the building down, but I saw that frame, and there's no way it happened the way they told us."
I took a few steps toward down the hallway. He started following me. I did not want this guy following me to my car. I pressed the Down button.
"Well, jet fuel burns at about 2000 degrees," I said -- I figured there was no way to walk away from this conversation; I was engaged, for better or worse. "And steel starts to lose strength after a couple of hours at those temperatures."
"I saw the frame of that building in Spain." Ding. The doors to the elevator opened. He stepped in. "And I've seen a welder. That arc gets up to 10,000 degrees, and the steel doesn't even melt then." He kept talking even as the doors closed.
The guy probably meant well. But really: what kind of person starts up a random conversation with a stranger in an elevator, with the intent to sell him on a conspiracy theory? The man had some confidence to just come right out with his moonbattery without being at a rally or some such. Further, I would never have had him pegged as such a weirdo if I saw him in a lineup; he looked perfectly normal until he started talking about jet fuel. Completely out of thin air.
As for me, I'm exhausted.
I've had a really stressful day, for reasons I won't get into. Let me put it this way: Over the last year, I went through breakups and personal drama, career issues, and other significant craziness, and not once did I get a stress sore on the inside of my mouth. But I got one today. Hopefully it'll be cleared up soon. In any case, the day's events just punctuate the fact that I need some serious change in my life, and that it needs to come sooner rather than later.
Posted by Matt at March 8, 2005 11:56 PM
