My Own Personal Horror Film

So it seems that art does indeed imitate life. Last night I was leaving work through my usual route. A typical evening on a typical humid day. Thankfully, i had the benefit of growing up in Indiana where it is not unusual to have 90% humidity on a summers day so i don't gripe about it nearly as often as say our friendly neighbors to the north aka Canadians. I make my way down the elevator from the 3rd floor to the parking garage, get all the way to my bike and realize that i left my keys upstairs... again. "How the hell did i do that?", i asked myself. I know that i had them in my hands before i left. So i make my way back across the parking garage to the elevator hop in and BOOM! Two seconds into my journey lights out! The power failed.
I immediately did the "oh shit" face and at that moment the emergency light shorted out. Double shit. It was dark, scary, and humid. Were it anywhere near Christmas time i had half expected at that moment to receive a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past to show me where exactly i went wrong in life. However i am 3,000 miles away from the nearest Christian county so i pushed the thought quickly out of my head. Instead of blaming Chinese quality control (because it's simply too easy) i began to blame myself. Why in the four months riding this damned contraption did i never take note to see if it had an emergency phone!? But then i began to forgive myself because even if it did have a phone I realized that I don’t know how to stay emergency, stuck, or even its too humid in Chinese! Then i REALLY began to blame myself. Why the hell have i not been studying more?! Grrrr. How can you call for help if you don't even know how to say where you are?
I decided to take matters into my own hands. I had not been in the elevator but only a few seconds before losing power so the likelihood i was in-between floors was small. I pried my fingers through the doors and began to pull them apart. It worked. Indeed I was not yet between floors. I still had about 3 feet of clearance and in fact it was a perfect height to find the latch mechanism to manually disengage the shaft door. Awesome, now for step two.... I cant see a damn thing. Oh yeah, but i do have a cell phone. I pull out my glowing black beauty and slid it open to give myself at least a lightning bugs butt worth of light. I didn't complain though. A quick study of the shaft doors and i found the trip cable which led me to the lever. *Click. Walla. I slid them open and crouched down to slip out below. About this time a thought crossed my mind. Wouldn't it really suck if the power came back on the exact moment i tried to slip out and cut my body in half? I decided that indeed this would not be desirable and i should stop wasting time even considering such a thought and just get the hell out.
I hit the floor of the basement feeling quite proud of myself. Ha, rescuers? I don't need no stinkin rescuers!" I was also very thankful for the hours of youth i had spent at Church bored out of my mind and messing around the inside of the elevator hitting the stop switch and opening the doors to see how it all worked. That and episode 57 of McGuiver.
Now the sight before me, up until that moment, I had thought that was never really possible without a special effects crew. The entire basement lightning system was haywire powering on and off, flickering and the wires were making sounds of mass amounts of electricity flowing through them at dangerous levels. Not only that but the basement is quite large so the power would start going off at one end and make its way down to me as if the darkness was getting closer and closer over and over. Yeah, pretty eerie. So, unlike all the other white people in horror films i didn't stick around to investigate. Plus, i was wearing more than my underwear. When i finally got outside i could see that the whole substructure of the building seemed to be out. I walked back up the stairs and on the third level everything seemed to be fine. In fact is was quite normal. No one had any idea i was stuck in the elevator or that the power went out. It was as if it were all in my head. Which reminds me of the first and last time i tried LSD. But that's another story.