elevator.txt

[Mosh in a Lift, 8/22/2012, by Iain Learmonth <irl at sdf dot org> CC-BY-SA]
[URL: gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/irl/blog/2012-08-22-mosh-in-a-lift.md]

Every quater, me and my flatmate pay about _80 to the Aberdeen City
Council for maintainence of the lifts in our building. As I write this, I
am trapped in one of these lifts. It appears that none of the buttons
work except for the alarm button. You'd think this would connect you to
an operator somewhere who would dispatch a repair team, but no. This
sounds a loud alarm and nothing else.

I have used the button many times so far, I'm about 20 minutes in, but I
have no idea if anyone heard it or even knew what it was when they did. I
certainly had no idea that was the noise that the lift made when someone
needed assistance.

Why would you build a metal box, which shields almost all radio from
working, and not put a telephone in it? I have managed to get a few text
messages to my flatmate who hopefully has phoned the council.
Unfortunately, the message asking him to phone the council has not been
sent yet, but he knows I'm trapped in a lift and have barely any signal.
I have literally only been able to send two text messages in the time
I've been in here.

I've started to settle in now. I've got my stuff arranged on the floor
and I'm sat here quite happily typing away, but I can't help but wonder
what I'm going to do when I need to take a piss.

**The following was written once I left the lift.**

After the first hour, I started to panic a bit. The alarm button wasn't
getting anyone's attention except for two people who used the other lift
at some point that started to mock me for being stuck in the lift. Wtf?
After pacing up and down in this lift, dispite the lack of pacing space,
I decided it was time to try other methods of contacting the outside
world.

I'm still in a metal box, but at this point the lift had moved to be
close enough to my flat to connect to the wifi. My first thought was
Twitter although this was pretty much a non-starter. The interface
wouldn't load properly in the web browser and I imagine I was seeing
quite heavy packet loss. Once I left the lift, I could see the tweet had
posted, but while in the lift I had no confirmation of it at all.

Then, [mosh][] and the [SDF MetaArray][] to the rescue. mosh can cope
with this high level of packet loss and worked a hell of a lot better
than I'd expected to. I managed to get logged in to the SDF MetaArray,
open mutt and send an email. Within minutes, the fire brigade had been
called and were on their way to rescue me.

Then, the lift started working again miraculously and let me out. I was
sitting on the floor so I just threw my MacBook, hoody and bag out of the
lift and jumped after them. As I did, the door to the lift closed behind
me. The fire brigade arrived and tested the lifts were working, but I
took the stairs back up to the flat. I think it'll be a while until I
trust those lifts again. I might look into boosting the signal on my WiFi
access point so that I can use mosh again if this happens to occur again.

[mosh]: http://mosh.org/
[SDF MetaArray]: http://sdf.org/?tutorials/metaarray