Update on last week! The only thing gassier than me is, apparently, my girlfriend's apartment. We got a phone call Friday night that said that the FDNY broke the door down to stop a gas leak. I'm glad they were able to shut it off. I'm a little jealous of the apartment, trying to steal my gas title by "threatening to explode!" How petty!

You would think that I would have only had to interact with the FDNY once this weekend. Well, you'd be wrong, you idiot. I saw them again for a totally unrelated reason. This reason is my brother's worst fear come to fruition: a stuck elevator. I can now check "stuck in an elevator full of Asian people" off my bucket list.

I used to live near Koreatown. Koreatown isn't so much a town as it is a street in midtown Manhattan. I lived in the building opposite the rooftop bar that I was hanging out in on Saturday. That was easy street. I called it easy street because my rent was $1500, and I could easily see myself living on the street. How lucky I was to be alive right then! I've since moved far away, but I'll always remember that building for what it had: working elevators. (Close friends/visitors will point out that the elevators were regularly under maintenance and usually not working. Shhh!!!) The hotel NYMA, right behind my old apartment, needs to get itself together.

We had gotten tired of paying way too high prices for way too sweet margaritas at a way too high up bar. It was called Cloud Social, which I thought was the sequel to Cloud Atlas, the only movie featuring Tom Hanks that isn't three hours long. But alas, it's just a bar where you can talk to and look at the clouds (touching costs extra!). Well, we were done with it and ready to move. A bunch of us piled onto the elevator, about 14 in total. We hit the L button and made our descent. The elevator hit floor L, but the doors never opened.

We were stunned. Some people started to get scared. I was confidently telling everyone that the doors take a while to open. No one was buying it, especially not the doors. They remained shut, like the legs of girl you just insulted. In fact I'm pretty sure I did insult the girls behind us in the elevator. The first thing we all felt was the heat. I don't want to say it was hot in there, but at one point we were drawing dicks on the foggy doors. Drawing dicks on the foggy doors is a euphemism that I use for sex, but in this case I meant it literally.

Someone had the bright idea to call 911. I said good luck, as AT&T gets terrible service everywhere. We got a hold of the police (whoop! whoop!), who had the FDNY show up. Ladder 24, to be exact. Fine men there. They yelled through the doors to make sure we were ok, and then insulted us by saying that the elevator got stuck because we had too many people in there. I challenged (Point/Counterpoint). If you think of the average person as weighing 150 pounds, then 14 x 150 = 2100 pounds, weigh under the 2500 pound limit. Take that, FDNY. Just get us out of this elevator.

They pried the elevator open with a crowbar. We were not in fact at the lobby. We had gone about 2.5 feet past. The cinderblock ledge we stepped up on to was the lobby. I let the ladies and children exit first, then I gingerly stepped up out of the elevator with the help of August and September from Ladder 24. I ran out of the hotel, but not before inquiring about the rates and if there was an elevator discount. The front desk guy wasn't amused, but I wasn't expecting him to be. I'll be contacting management.

All in all, it was a good elevator story. My favorite part was when the guy behind us said "Can we stop the unnecessary talking, it's fogging up the elevator?" And then a bunch of us slowly suffocated him with our belts. I didn't stick around to see what FDNY did with him, but hey, at least the doors were a little less foggy. Heat rises, so we all helped him go low. Moral of the story? I used to live in midtown Manhattan, right by Koreatown.