Books by Ian Rogers
Books by Ian Rogers
I studied Zoology at university. Occasionally I visited other disciplines in other buildings. One of these had a strange escalator/lift arrangement. At each landing of the staircase there were two doorways in one wall. No doors. Where lift should have been there were cubicles that forever progressed up in one doorway and down in the other. One simply stepped into a moving cubicle and got carried upwards.
Two questions sprang to the intelligent (or not so the intelligent) mind. First what happened at the top of the shaft? Were the cubicles attached to an endless belt so when they were pulled over the top and they were inverted to go down the ‘down shaft`? Easy to find out, I just stayed put and waited. The cubicle did not go round at the top and come down “upside down” - much to my relief but slight surprise. The cubicle slid across sideways and started down with me still in a standing position, not tipped onto my head.
The second question was this; as a cubicle descended past the level of a landing, wouldn’t it amputate the foot of anyone on the landing who stuck their foot under the descending cubicle? The floor had an obviously hinged flap at the front, so it was easy to do an experiment. With several feet of descent still to go, I simply got hold the flap by the outer edge and tugged upwards.
All the cubicles stopped. Alarm bells rang, up and down the stair well. I hopped out onto the stairs, feeling extremely foolish and embarrassed and hoping no one had seen me! A lecturer going down stairs passed me, going up, and saw I was looking rather anxious. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The thing gives false alarms all the time, we should never had it built”. A bit later I mentioned the weird lifts in conversation with a few other students.
“Ooh I hate those,” one girl said “I’m scared I’ll get carried up over the top.”
“Not a problem,” I told them, “the cubicles just slide sideways and come down.”
People were amazed that I’d stayed in the lift to see what happened. A case of fools rush in where angels fear to tread, perhaps? In retrospect, it wasn’t very brave. A public building couldn’t have a system that turned you into mincemeat if you failed to get off at the top floor.
This says a lot about our fear of the unknown. Most people are be scared of something huge that might gobble them up. Could this be why so few people will risk knowing God?
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