Acclimitised (stairs) - June 2015

The other day I was trotting down the stairs at work. This is a pretty dismal stairway, all closed off from the outside world by cement blocks dressed in grimy ochre paint, supported by steel handrails and accessible through metal fire doors- and where you have to have your ID to get out anyplace above the first floor. (Yes, I found that out the hard way.) When I'm in it, I fondly remember the stairs up to the Evaluation Center at WMU - all windows and light and oxygen. Several times when I've been in the stairway here, the lights have shut off when I'm halfway between floors. The first time it took me 3 floors of careful climbing before I realized there was a way to turn the lights back on.

Needless to say, they are not frequently used. When I'm in the staircase, I'm often the only one.

Because of the narrowness of the staircase, there's no way to see if anyone is above or below. But with all that cement and metal, you can certainly hear if someone else is in there with you. I've been back to climbing the stairs now that I'm mostly recovered from falling off my bike in Jan. On this day, I hopped on at Level 4 to go down and it sounded like all kinds of people were in the stairway. (I think it was probably 3 of us, total, across 12 levels of stairs.) I got down a level, and there was my friend and colleague Georgia (also a stair user) on her way up. We both laughed about all the footsteps echoing in the stairway, and she said, "It's like Bourke Street in here today." I laughed again, because this is what Bourke Street looks like:

And then I laughed some more because that was a total Melbourne joke and I got it!

Turns out laughter carries pretty well in that stairway, too.