When you work in a building with lots of executives, you are bound to run into at least one who is hard to deal with.

What would you do if you were responsible for running the tests on one of the building elevators, and an annoying member of upper management jumped on even though the sign said it was closed?

that is what happened to the facilities manager in this story, so he had the elevator run through its tests, stopping at every floor, wasting her previous time.

Rude Banking Exec turned lift surfer

Back in 2007 I was working as part of the Facilities Management Team at a prestigious tower block at 25 Canada Square, within London’s Canary Wharf (Financial District).

We housed the European leadership teams of many worldwide household names such as Citibank, Lehman’s, Bank of America all major players on the global stage.

It’s fair to say that most of the occupants within the building were kind and respectful and treated me and my team well; whether it was a “Hi how are you”, or random acts of kindness such as offering to pay for my whole team to celebrate solving a problem with the HVAC system that had been going on for months and months, or just a bit of friendly banter.

There is always one.

There were, however, exceptions including a very rude senior executive who we will call “Karen” from Lehman’s brothers (the defunct bank that got caught with its trousers down in 2008, a year after my petty revenge.

This exec was a particularly nasty piece of work, I had seen her being rude to her staff in public spaces and generally.

This ranged from shouting at them, ordering them to make her coffee or to fetch things; all done without any eye contact, nor balanced (from my observation) of some positive aspects of leadership (such as saying thank you).

The tower housed supermarkets and other facilities, where I and others would observe her barging past people in queues due to her own self-importance.

She must have been very good at her job.

She certainly was one of the elite, she had a large office with her name on the door, her own parking spot in one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the city, which she only used one day a week, and refused to let anyone else use it when she wasn’t in.

I think you get the picture – right?

As with all buildings we have a bunch of mandatory checks to perform to ensure that the equipment is safe and effective in use, but as with mechanical equipment, sometimes it fails and requires additional maintenance – that was the scenario with this particular lift.

Keeping a building running takes a lot of work.

We worked long hours and outside of core office hours to ensure the building was working like a well-oiled machine, however we had a problem removing, then sourcing and refitting a faulty transponder which wasn’t quite working properly, this was now fixed and very close to entering service following the final checks to ensure everything was working as planned, lift 5 was out of action.

Picture the scene – We had just finished our annual planned emergency fire evacuation drill, the tower has been emptied of its occupants (roughly 2,000 on that particular day) so after the test was complete there was a predictable huge demand for the lifts, with only 7 of the 8 available to take passengers to their place of work.

Waiting in line is no big deal.

Most people had planned for this and formed orderly (British style) queues to get back to work, with the exception of Karen.

She strutted around the ground floor proclaiming how ridiculous it was that a lift was out of action and that she would be late for a Board meeting with the Global leadership team in the USA (yada, yada, yada, yada).

She was barking instructions at her young, and stressed PA who was following her around like a loyal dog would to its owner whilst calling her colleagues to explain how ridiculous it was that the building was not in full working order.

“These brits need to learn a few things regarding efficiency”.

I was close by standing by lift 5 when she came and asked if she could skip the queue and jump in.

I said it was undergoing final tests before being put back into use so it wasn’t possible to use it for 10 more minutes; clear signage showed the lift was not to be used, I explained I was sorry but it wasn’t possible.

Karen thinks she is clever.

I had to take a radio call from David the lift engineer so turned my back slighlty so as not to disturb her.

Unfortunately for Karen she had jumped into the lift alone; in the vein hope of getting back in time for her urgent meeting; despite there being clear signage at the entrance and inside the lift saying do not use.

I turned around and saw the lift doors closing, just catching sight of her inside and saw the opportunity to exact revenge.

David , the lift engineer, who was connected to the control system waiting my command to commence the final transponder checks.

This comprised the lift following a set test algorithm.

It rose to each floor then stopped for 5 seconds (to ensure the floor sensors are calibrated properly) before repeating on every floor on the way back to the lobby.

This whole process always took 10 minutes.

Why didn’t she just hop off when it stopped at one of the floors?

So it transpired Karen had 10 glorious minutes in lift 5 surfing the 45 floors of 25 Canada Place in the heart of London’s financial district, before arriving back in front of me, with the doors opening as I was radioed by Mark to confirm the test had been successful and that the lift could be put back into use.

I took great pleasure in using more of her valuable time as I asked for her name and company details so that I could record this as a Health and Safety incident in the log book.

She had failed to follow Health and Safety procedures and in doing so was in breach of Lehman’s agreement with the building owners and operators so this was an important detail I had to capture and report to the company formally.

I’m sure they all loved that.

Luckily there were still a few people remaining who took great delight in seeing this terrible woman being held accountable for her actions.

Normally to get to the 25th floor would have taken her 45 seconds, it actually took her about 15 minutes 🙂

I did see her from time to time afterwards, but I never saw any change in her behaviors sadly.

She was having a very bad year.

Actually, the last time I saw her was in 2008 about a week before her colleagues from Lehman’s were leaving the buildings with plundered IT equipment as they tried to ensure they got some value from the company that collapsed around them.

Revenge was sweet.

How could she think this was going to work out in her favor? It is remarkable that people like this can be so successful in life.

Read on to see what the people in the comments think of this story.

Now that would have been gold.

Good question!

Oh, I’m sure she loved it.

Very punny.

Icing on the cake.

This woman thought she was above the rules, but then she was let down…slowly.

Pretty funny.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.