Elevator Operation

Elevator operation is a skill that few young men of my generation have learned. Some of us grew up in small towns, where there were no tall buildings, and thus no elevators. We learned of the existence of elevators in movies, and wondered what that sort of vertical motion felt like. We determined to experience it for ourselves one day. We remember a sexist hick joke involving said hick, withered old bag, bombshell, elevator, and impressionable hick's desire to place his own wife in this magical box. We laughed.
Later we would ride in elevators. Pressing the button to induce motion, and with time learning that the buttons with horizontal arrows had the power to open and close doors on floors , we became confident with these machines. We could move up and down with ease in tall buildings, like the department store in the mall.
Later we moved to the city, and needed work. We found it in telemarketing, copy-writing, trade-show salesmanship and persuasion, confidence games, furniture moving, room painting, and as our condition worsened, sandwich board marketing. We despaired, suicidally, of ever finding work commensurate to our skills and abilities.
We were surprised when we found that work. The Universe was no longer absurd. Elevator operation saved our life. Before our time, before even the time when our mothers and fathers were the daughters and sons of the daughters and sons of failed farmers turned midwest factory workers, there were tall buildings in the big cities in which lived the rich of their time. In these buildings were elevators, but in the time before circuit boards and solid state, there were no buttons. There was a knob, and a lever, and to turn these knobbed levers, there were elevator operators. This was the time of the post-Gilded Age, the only somewhat tarnished Age, the F Scott Fitzgerald age, the age that ignored the Grapes of Wrath, the age that had yet to to turn the Grapes of Wrath into Cold War wine and a car in every driveway and suburbs and factory towns and good jobs for high-school graduates.
The rarefied worlds on the upper sides of Olmsted's masterpiece preserve these elevators, elevator operator is not a retronym, elevator attendants press buttons and are shameless parasites, a leisure class of the leisure class, even if they do carry things sometimes. Elevator operators turn knobs, and these knobs are attached to levers, and these levers open the circuits that run the motors that turn the pulleys that move the cables that lift the cabs that bring the the rulers, and their husbands and their wives, and their sons and their daughters, and their guests, and their nannies and their home health care providers, and their housekeepers, and their deliveries of mail, and of communication by messenger of papers too important, urgent, or sensitive to be trusted to the mail, and deliveries of food; both groceries and prepared meals, and wine, and liquor and, and new clothes in fancy packaging, and dry cleaning, and regular laundry, and all other things, sundry and extraordinary, large and small. It is work that is essential to the smooth operation of the city, and we are proud of it. Our skills and abilities are commensurate to its demands.
Yet, at other times, we wonder if there is not some other manner in which we might prove useful. We keep a record, and wait.