"It Has Its Ups And Downs"

There's a second part to the elevator/flyer/email chain story I posted yesterday, and it's awesome. You'll have to forgive me for lying to you yesterday. My brother did not sustain any injuries to his brain. I made that up for humorous effect. I hope you can forgive me.

After getting word that he had to remove all of the flyers from the elevators, my older brother went to the elevator bay and pressed the button. And the first two elevators were easy. He took the first one to the top floor, removed the flyer and then sent it back down so he could summon a second elevator. That worked fine. But then he got on and right back off the second one and sent it back down the same way. The problem was that the elevator he sent down first came right back up. And he kept trying to send them both down at the same time. But they kept alternating and coming right back up. So he just had to keep jumping on and off of two of the elevators.

And that would be frustrating in its own right. But making matters worse was the fact that people kept walking up to use the elevator. And my brother had already pressed the button. So when the new person got on, my brother had to stay on that floor. And given the strange circumstances and limited time available, he couldn't explain himself. It was something you'd expect to see in a sitcom.

He couldn't say, "Go ahead. I'm waiting on a specific elevator." Because then he'd look like a lunatic. And he couldn't say, "I'll just wait for the next one." Because you only say that when an elevator is full. And he didn't have enough time to explain about the posters. So he came off as weird.

But then it got worse. Because the one time he hit the button, and a group of people (of a different ethnicity than he is) came to wait for the elevator too. And when he refused to get on the elevator, they held the door and said "Come on in, there's room." And he only had a few seconds' time to succinctly explain his weird actions. So he said, "That's okay. This is the wrong elevator for me. I have to wait for a different one."

So now there is a small group of people at his office who think he's one of three things: really weird, really racist, or weirdly racist.