Look who's talking

Crowded lifts are fun. Notice how ten people in a lift will stay perfectly silent; they’ll look up at the display counting the floors, look at their shoes, and look at the walls of the lift. There’s a cold silence and something tells you that everyone inside prefers it that way. Isn’t it funny how people can stand next to each other and go up 23 floors without making an eye contact? And that sight when the floor has ‘arrived’. I’ve noticed how men and women will literally rush out of the lift as soon as it lands, almost like a Ferrari in a pit stop whose crew took a second too much to refuel. Men will steal glances, searching around for the best assets and women will punch away into their cell phones like that’s the last hope for survival.

How do I know this? I ride up and down five floors each day looking at assets. We are men, and that’s how we are wired.

* * *

“I think she should start hanging out with single men more often”, I thought to myself, as I stood in the lift.

Her hands were folded, shoulders slightly stooped and the hair tucked behind the ears suggested that the she had been complimented on her ear rings earlier in the day. Her glance was fixed to the floor and the corner of my eyes was fixed on her.

“But you know girls. They like committed men.” my alter ego said.

“Yeah, but what good is that? If she gave single guys a chance, it would be good for all 4 of us.”, I couldn’t help but think to myself.

“Who four?”

“Herself, that guy, his wife and the single men. It’s such a win-win-win-win situation if she only decides”

The lift reached the ground floor and we all moved out.

* * *

I like Mel Gibson’s movie What Women Want. In the movie, by a stroke of circumstance, he gets the ability to hear what a woman is thinking. I visualize a device that can give each of us the power to do this; and I don’t mean masculine and feminine. I mean everybody can hear what every other person is thinking.

Here’s the catch: This device will work only inside lifts.

I wonder what she must have thought had she heard what I was thinking inside that lift. Probably something like, “Jerk!”

But the device is still an idea. Until lifts are equipped with this ‘thought hearing device’, I still maintain that she needs to give single men a chance.