As an escalator, I’m used to anonymity. Seriously, who cares about me? I’m simply an assemblage of conveyor belts attached to a spindle and driven by a motor at a steady speed that has been determined safe for humans to step on and off without falling and hurting themselves. I am a handrail belt moving at a speed synchronized with the speed of the steps. I am a tool, a conveyance, and I move steadily around and around and around like a perpetual motion machine.
I am, like your car’s engine or the hidden nodes and backchannels atop which the Internet is built or an unwanted stepchild, designed to not be noticed. I am the unseen machine under the surface, invisible, humming along, keeping everything moving while you forget I exist.
I do the work so that humans can spend their time yammering on cell phones or telling their children to behave instead of putting in the effort to walk up or down a flight of stairs. I am simply there, in the background, moving people from one floor to another, humming, never questioning my purpose.
Now I will grant you that as an escalator at the United Nations building, I have carried some pretty important people! I have carried ambassadors, emissaries, ministers, military leaders, heads of state. I have been privy to the negotiations and interpersonal relationships of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of world leaders. I have been ridden by more famous people than the busiest sexworker in a Hollywood whorehouse.
So, imagine my surprise this past week when I briefly became the most famous escalator in the world, the one that stopped cold the moment that Donald and Melania Trump stepped on me. Suddenly I went from anonymity to being surrounded by more conspiracy theories than the Kennedy assassination.
Seriously, do you watch Fox News? All week all of these insane Republicans were on Fox’s airwaves hollering that I was part of a plot by, in the words of Trump’s insane press secretary, “UN globalist staffers,” along with my buddies the teleprompter and the speaker system in the General Assembly Hall, in a plot to “set up” the president.
Excuse me, set him up for what? Set him up to embarrass himself? Set him up to be very briefly and somewhat lightly inconvenienced? Set him up to have to walk up a flight of stairs on those massively swollen cankles, at which point he would be so winded that he couldn’t give his speech? Was the teleprompter going down a backup in case the act of climbing me didn’t give him a heart attack?
Please. Someone tell Sorority Sally up there to go back to worrying about her costume for the Kappa Alpha Halloween mixer. President Trump does not need my help embarrassing himself, as he proceeded to prove by spending an hour haranguing a room full of diplomats from every nation on Earth about the decision to let someone else besides him renovate the UN building decades ago, which is why their expensively shod feet had to tread on terrazzo floors instead of marble to get to the room where they were sitting and listening to him.
Honestly, I think everyone would have been grateful to me if breaking down had somehow prevented the American president from speaking. Think of everything else they could have then spent that hour doing! Negotiating world peace, for instance. That would have been a good one.
Some of the nuttier folks on the Right ranted that someone stopped me in order to put Trump at risk for assassination by making him a stationary target for a moment. As if this was the only time in a decade that Donald Trump has been standing still in public. As if a sniper somehow defeated all the insane levels of security to get into the building. As if when I operate at my normal speed, I’d have been moving President Banana Pants and First Lady Melonhead too fast for a competent sniper to handle.
For a moment there, I knew what it must have felt like to be the car that was carrying the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess Sophie, which stopped for a second when the driver realized he was going the wrong way, just long enough for Gavrilo Princip to hop up on the running board.
You want to know the truth of what happened? So, I have a safety mechanism. Really, I have a few. They are designed to bring me to a complete stop if their sensors detect some sort of obstruction. Or if they sense that I have been loaded down with more weight than I am rated to hold at one time. No, that is not a comment on Trump’s weight. I’ve carried heavier than him.
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Anyway, my safety mechanisms. If you have an untied shoelace, and that shoelace gets caught under the comb safety plate at the top of me while you’re getting off, I immediately shut down. That way, your foot doesn’t get dragged under the comb plate, along with the rest of you, to suffer a grisly death like you’re in one of those Final Destination movies.
This isn’t my choice, it’s automatic. You think there aren’t people I’d like to drag to a grisly death? But I can’t, because my job is to not be noticed. And nothing would get me noticed faster than taking Donald Trump’s leg off at the knee, assuming his barrel-sized ankles could fit under my comb plate.
No, what happened is that this White House videographer was running up and down on me to get some footage of the Trumps on their way to the speech. And in his running, he appears to have accidentally caused one of my sensors to flip out and shut me down. Even I’m not a hundred percent clear on why. What I do know is that the stoppage in no way involved UN globalists. Whatever those even are.
Listen, I get it. The wingnuts need something to be mad and paranoid about. I used to be on Twitter, so I’ve seen and read it all. If they aren’t stewing over some tiny slight or grievance, they don’t know what to do with themselves. I don’t understand how they live that way. It must be exhausting.
And Trump is the biggest grievance monger of them all. Just look at this screed he wrote after I slightly inconvenienced him by forcing him to undergo the energy-sapping activity that is walking:
“Sinister events!” “Triple sabotage”! He and Melania barely escaped severe injury or even death only because they were holding on to my handrail! This was like Vietnam for him, and he didn’t have bone spurs to get him out of it.
That’s all nuts, right? Right.
So, after almost a week of being torn up by maintenance workers, of being scrutinized and defamed and slandered and threatened by a bunch of dumb jerks intent on using me for clout, I have a message for Donald Trump: Next time you’re here at the UN, take the goddamn elevator.
[NPR]
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