White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention (which he shunned but thrilled to), prodded by friends, and perhaps provoked by overly solicitous overtures from McGraw-Hill, White fell under the sway of renown and grievance, and then that of the legal establishment. He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building's management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures. He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he'd held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed.

According to Article 9 of the city's building code (section [C26-608.3] 27-392 to be exact and yes, looking at that number makes our head hurt too), which is available on the mayor's website, "Floor numbering signs" are indeed kind of important! Any office building with either one elevator or more than 500 people (that's you, fancy New York Times building!) must have signs that "shall be posted and maintained within each stair enclosure on every floor, indicating the number of the floor." Emphasis ours, so on and so forth.

The Times, along with the new Hearst building and some 300 other Manhattan buildings, has "smart elevator" technology. You can read all about how it works in a generally favorable 2005 piece the Times did—and more on it today, as well, less happily.

With smart elevator systems, riders choose their destination first on a lobby panel outside and are then directed into the appropriate elevator—which, as Curbed noticed this summer, don't contain any buttons at all.

As far as we can tell, "smart" elevators sure don't break any building codes and last time we checked we weren't professional architects or building inspectors, but still. Considering the fallibility of anything that runs on a computer, we would assume clearly marking the brick-and-mortar stairwells used in case of emergency would have been done six months before staffers at the Times were moved into their new headquarters, not six months after. Even if the building's signage is kosher, would you relish working in a building where you're forced to take the word of management and your elevator that you're on the 10th floor?

Elevators are for people who pay into the system dammit, like Leona Helmsley (victim of judicial activism!) and Al Capone (inventive entrepreneur and misunderstood capitalist!) Most people who go to family court are illegal sex offenders living off the welfare system we pay for anyway an—yeah, alright, enough of that—impersonating neocons wears me right out.

Still, devoting 1,000 words to (of the myriad deficiencies within the family courts system) the dilapidated pulley system? Huh! "The potential loss is not simply that of time wasted, but of the quality of justice that is dispensed," reads the Times piece. My, my, I was just thinking very nearly the same thing about the quality of journalism here! Plus, lengthy and tortured metaphors on the judicial system's slow choking wheels and impenetrable class-and-glass ceiling plain old piss me off. That is all.

NYTimes: At Bronx Court, Elevator Woes Slow Justice