All together now: Thank you, Mr Otis. Every year at about this time, city dwellers should show their gratitude to the man who gave us our skylines.
You see, it was on March 23, 1857, that Elisha Graves Otis launched the first commercial elevator, making tall buildings possible.
But in doing so, he introduced a transport conundrum that adds stress to the lives of billions of apartment block dwellers every day.
When I was a kid, I had to catch the 7.50 a.m. bus. So I went out of my front door at 7.49 a.m. Easy. Then I moved to an apartment. I still had to catch the 7.50 a.m. bus. I walked out of my front door at 7.49 and waited for the elevator.
It delivered me to the bus stop, sometimes one minute later, sometimes eight minutes later, or sometimes at noon the following Tuesday.
"This lift has a mind of it's own," my flatmate told me. "And it hates us." I didn't realize she meant it literally until I got to know it. The thing would zoom past us on the way up. Then it would fill itself up with people and zoom past us on the way down.
The third time it whizzed past us I'm sure I heard it say in an electronic voice: "Nyeh-nyeh, you can wait till doomsday, losers."
These days, the stakes are high, and we cannot afford to miss it. All three of my children take different routes to school. If we don't get to street level at the right time, we miss all the school buses and car pool rides.
After months of experimentation, we worked out that there is a slight lull in elevator traffic at 7.41. If we call the elevator at that moment, we will all catch our respective rides.
But there's a downside. We have to get in the lift at precisely that time, whether we are ready or not. Last Tuesday, this meant getting dressed in the lift. On Wednesday, it meant packing our bags in that small space.
On Thursday, it meant eating breakfast in the elevator. (Sorry about the mess, neighbors.) On Friday, we were really behind schedule. In the 7.41 elevator we got dressed, packed our bags, ate breakfast, did hair bands, tied shoelaces, applied cosmetics, had a de-stress massage, and picked spinach off our teeth.
The long-suffering people in the floors above are used to us now, and will hold our coffee and bags while I finish making the kids' packed lunches.
It's amazing how fast you can butter bread when the ground floor is approaching at 200 meters a minute. Once, I found I had put my trousers on back to front and had to whip them off and put them on again.
Given that there is a full-color surveillance camera in the elevator linked to a color TV monitor in the foyer of the building, our family's lift high speed lift activities surely provides hours of entertainment for everyone. Of course, it is only a matter of time before I am arrested for indecent exposure. I will blame Mr. Otis. He has to take the rough with the smooth.
The writer is a columnist and journalist.
