The Fraught Future of the Post-Pandemic Office Elevator
As remote workers return to their buildings, iconic elevator maker Otis grapples with a product everyone’s suddenly terrified of
The first movie to include coronavirus was, appropriately enough, a horror film. Corona, a Canadian film, unfolds like the stuff of an oft-tweeted pandemic nightmare: Seven neighbors are trapped in an elevator — where it’s impossible to socially distance — and one of them has Covid-19.
Stephen Nichols hasn’t seen the film but he doesn’t need to. Nichols is the associate director of engineering for Farmington, Connecticut-based Otis, the 167-year-old elevator company that operates in more than 200 countries, maintaining some 2 million elevators. “My family doesn’t like watching movies that involve elevators with me because I kind of squirm,” Nichols says.
The frequency with which people are stuck in elevators on film bugs Nichols, since being trapped, at least for a significant length of time, is sufficiently rare that it can be national news. (It last happened to Otis in 2009, when eight passengers were trapped for five hours in an elevator stuck between the 42nd and 43rd floor in a Toronto tower.)
