Shoutout to the old Otis guy at the Marriott in St. Louis

He saw me struggling with a stuck door lock on an elevator. Just walked over and said "check the roller guides first kid." Spent 20 minutes watching him adjust them with a single crescent wrench. No fancy tools, no phone calls. Has anyone else had an old timer save your butt with just a quick tip?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_reese18d ago

People act like there's some sacred knowledge dying off but that's just nostalgia talking. Those old timers learned by trial and error because they had no other option, not because it was some superior method. A tablet with a proper diagnostic tool would have identified that door lock issue in 30 seconds flat instead of 20 minutes of fiddling around with a wrench. Technology exists for a reason, and acting like guessing at problems with a crescent wrench is some kind of lost art just ignores that we have better solutions now. The guys who call the number are the ones who don't waste your time with guesswork.

valgibson18d ago

...and that's exactly how it goes, isn't it. The older guys always have this quiet confidence from decades of just doing the work. They don't need a tablet or a service manual, they've seen every dumb problem a piece of machinery can throw at you. It's like the world is split into people who fix things by feel and people who just call a number. We're losing that whole way of knowing stuff, one retired elevator man at a time, and nobody seems to think it matters.