fools, roads, and elevators

My dear American reader, do you know what is it like when you have to live in a high-rise building where the elevator is living his own personal life? I guess you don't. It's impossible in your honest, regular, black-n-white life just because it's not prescribed by instructions. I remember a typical reaction of one Russian tourist back in 1999 when I found myself on the highest (102-th?) level of Empire State Building gazing at a cloud of smoke trailed from a closed door of (the only) shuttle elevator to 86-th.
Local officer had (very kindly) invited visitors to (very calmly) proceed to a staircase, trying to convince everybody including himself that there may well be smoke without fire. As you can guess, everybody had instantly got very calm and started speaking nice words on what they think about all this mess. An English-speaking part of a crowd voiced a common opinion that it's an extraordinary case and that elevators are usually the most durable and respectable devices they know. But -- alas! -- our Russian elevators is quite another matter! Huffing and puffing somewhere between 95 and 90-th, my fellow countryman said,

-- Блин, нахрен мы ваще сюда из Москвы перлись? ЛифтЫ и там никогда не работают.
... that meant approximately "Oh, dear, that's so familiar problem". </p>

Now you see elevators is a trouble of a nationwide proportion well commensurable with fools and roads. I'm quite sure Gogol hadn't mentioned it in his perennial masterpiece just because he was lucky to live in a country cottage (and in times when a project of the whole country's electrification had yet to be born with his declarer).

My arduous meditations on this matter were inspired by a misbehaviour of one bloody Elevator in my new apartment building. I'm living now on the 17-th floor, so you see this is a matter of quite a palpitating interest. The main problem is that This Malevolent Device refuses to lift any cargo lighter than its (unknown and, I suspect, depending on a person to be lifted) sensitivity threshold. Kind of a Maxwell's Daemon filtrating people by their weights. My kids say one can cheat with it by jumping on a sensitive spot just opposite the door; but this trick doesn't work in a case of my humble person. I guess this brute just has something against me personally. I may swear it likes gloating over me when I fail over and over again to fool its sensor taking a couple of bricks in my purse etc. So, I still have to keep training in upstairs marathon almost every night, in a faint hope to finally grow the muscle mass enough for being recognized by this Bloody Thing. Amen.