Last Tuesday morning I arrived at work at my usual 6.30am to get ready for the busy and promisingly productive day ahead.

Oh who am I kidding.

I arrived early to get ready for yoga.

We are lucky enough to get three yoga sessions a week at a subsidised $5 per session.

Added bonus being our yoga teacher is the best teacher I have had – for some time.

Feeling free and virtuous and very chillaxed after my morning yoga, I stepped into the lift with six of my fellow employees.

We made it to midway between 2nd and 3rd floor.

The lift stopped.

Then it started.

Then it fell slightly.

Ever so slightly.

With a thud.

Quickly gulping, Plan B rose to the surface.

Wait, there wasn’t a Plan B.

Was that bile?

Panic?

Past memories of that time I got stuck in another lift with a man and his scissor lift?

When we were building the Ballarat Regional Integrated Cancer Centre?

Building, being the operative word, where there weren’t many people around to hear our cries? Ok, my screams.

I am pretty sure this was not Plan B but pure unadulterated panic.

Concealed well by responding to the usual stuck lift jokes while the man at the front frantically pressed every button and I frantically tried to smile and calmly remind him there was an emergency phone.

And to STOP PRESSING EVERY BUTTON!

Thud and lift.

We were off.

Original destination, sixth floor. When the door opened it was the fourth.

Whereupon with lightening speed, I elbowed my way out and headed for those stairs I have hated so much. The rest of the group behind me.

Post my previous lift incident, I didn’t take a lift for some years.

Then of course my memory faded, as it does with age, and I got slack and started ‘lifting’ again.

To be fair, when I first arrived in my current job, I spent the first year taking the stairs, all six floors of them.

I would arrive at the top, sweaty and breathing heavy, pleased and a little full of myself for my efforts.

Until my knee conveniently started to complain.

My physio (pronounced with a ‘ph’ Timmy), somewhat coerced, suggested the stairs were probably not doing my knee any favours.

My lift life began.

Sometimes when I am feeling a little silly, I get in and turn to face my fellow travellers.

They don’t respond well to my Aussie sense of ‘uma’.

Sometimes I swear under my breath when someone gets in to take one floor.

And sometimes I rush to the lift to shut the door really quickly so I don’t have to talk to anyone.

No more.

I will join my colleague from the legal department.

In his sixtees, he takes those six floors every single morning.

Seemingly with ease.

Challenge accepted.