Awfully definite, this, don't you think? Unnervingly, it appears in every elevator in this large hotel complex, and it's getting me down.
Complex, it seems to me, is just about the right word for this labyrinthine pile. Just to get to my suite I have to take at least two elevators, unless I come at it from just the wrong direction, in which case it's three. And all of them bear this direct, admonitory statement. I stand and stare at it as the floors whisk by, all the while wondering if, when the doors at last open, I will see that the moment has arrived and be engulfed in flames.
It makes me wonder why there aren't more of these sobersided little missives places about. "WHEN there is a flood remain above the fourth floor," or "WHEN faced with revolution declare your allegiance to the proletariat." But no, the lifts, all of them, remain obdurately and single-mindedly conflagration-obsessed. I can't say it's affecting my sleep, yet, but I am considering stuffing wet towels under the doors before nodding off.
And so another week of pedagogy dawns, and while I did escape a bit this weekend, I think I'm becoming a little hotel-bound. There are certainly worse places to be trapped, and when I get home it will be a little wrench to have to take on all the small necessities, from laundry to bed-making to fresh flowers in the sitting room, that are dealt with so unobtrusively here. Even so - one does miss those damned dogs, not to mention a certain Egyptian.
And hanging over it all, ever lurking just in the background, that inexorable "WHEN"...
But it is ever so polite.
ReplyDeleteBut think - if this IS "Towering Inferno", you'll at least have Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and William Holden for comfort... Jx
ReplyDeleteSomehow I doubt that Bangkok fire & rescue runs to such decorativeness...
DeleteSuprised no one has taken out a lipstick and written underneath... just run for your lives! It's begging to be done.
ReplyDeleteElevators & fire are tricky business. Just ask Jennifer Jones. She survived Duel in the Sun (well, more or less), the train station in Since You Went Away, and marriage to Robert Walker & David O. Selznick. But that damned elevator was the end of her (not to mention her chiffon gown).
ReplyDeleteI will make a note to ditch the chiffon before making my inevitable descent, not by lift.
DeleteA free falling Muscato, in his lingerie...or less...strikes me as just the right tone for a fabulous exit from this mortal coil. It will also make for one hell of an appropriate entrance onto the distant, misty shores of Fabulon.
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