You wake up. Quite jarringly, in fact. Your head hurts, and you seem to be in a polished metal box. There's a set of doors on one side, but no doorknob. Right next to the door, there's a small panel. It has half a dozen buttons, labeled 1-6.

The button with the number 6 looks as if it's out of order. The button is hanging out of the socket by a red wire.

You're sure you've been in a place like this before, but you seem to remember it moving. Yes, these things are supposed to move. This one must be stuck. Call for help? Yes, you can call for help. But... how? You have no way to contact any people, and the elevator has nothing but the doors and the buttons.

Maybe you should press one.

Contemplating how to get the big metal box to move, you theorize that pushing one button at a time is a viable option. Logically the one signifies the first floor and will be the quickest way to an exit. But what if it doesn't move? You also don't know what floor you're currently on and with button six out of the equation, you know you're not likely to be going up any time soon.

With shaking hands, you close your eyes and press button one. Then you give a sigh of relief when nothing happens, because at least something bad didn't happen.

Still, you're starting to get hot inside the metal box and with little oxygen to speak of, you need to get moving.

Buttons two, three and four don't get you moving either.

As a last resort, you give all five working buttons a punch at the same time and finally you hear the whir of the turbine engine that makes the big metal box move. It clanks a bit, but eventually you feel the doors open on what looks like an active first floor and take a huge breath of clean air.

Stepping from the big metal box, you're loathe to let anyone else near it and try to get the attention of an attendant. Without too much humiliation, you track down a security guard and let them know of the faulty elevator. And when you finally see a couple strips of caution take stretched over the box, you turn and walk out into the world.