maintenance staircase dimension
February 13, 2022 8:08 AM   Subscribe

"It started with wondering through hallways in confusion before finding myself in this large room, expecting to find an exit on the other end. Instead, I found a bench and a locked door. At this point I texted my group chat. After laughing at me they recommended looking around." - William Yearout's Twitter thread about visiting a banal liminal space with 100% bad vibes.
posted by fight or flight (97 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
I’m going to try reading down this thread next.
posted by meinvt at 8:17 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


My husband got cancer treatment at a huge regional medical complex, the publically-accessible parts of the hospital were confusing enough.

Then, some elevators would have a back door that opened into the staff-only sections of the hospital and the few times we got a glimpse into the back hallways felt exactly like this. Sometimes patient transport would wheel him through what seemed like endless empty hallways with flickering lights. Thanks so much to the probably underpaid transporters who knew safe passage.
posted by muddgirl at 8:19 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]




Came here to post this too.
posted by flabdablet at 8:23 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


i'm sure there are supposed to be posts on metafilter but i keep clicking the exit link and i keep ending up back here
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 8:29 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


i can post screenshots if you don't believe me
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 8:30 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


What is the purpose behind these dramatically overbuilt, underutilized spaces? Future expansion plans? Resource sink / jobs program? It's just so bizarre to me that places like this get built in the first place.
posted by grokus at 8:37 AM on February 13, 2022


Best doubles!
posted by zengargoyle at 8:42 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


I don’t know if he said where this was but I feel like it was the San Antonio convention center, a place that gave me very similar vibes at AWP
posted by Countess Elena at 8:47 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


This is my worst nightmare.
posted by Gray Duck at 8:49 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


I feel a lot like I did when I could not successfully map an Infocom game to save my life.
posted by bixfrankonis at 8:57 AM on February 13, 2022 [14 favorites]


Once I was trying to pick up my badge at comic con and ended up in an empty hallway. I had been shuffling along with thousands of people chatting with a friend and then we were alone in what must of been a staff only area of the convention center. We just kept moving through empty spaces, wandering down hallways and pushing through doors, until suddenly we were at the wrong end of the badge pick up room. A staff volunteer saw us looking confused and escort us to the pickup table. Our other friends who somehow didn’t wander off showed up 40 minutes later and asked us how we skipped ahead. We had no idea.
posted by lepus at 9:01 AM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]


How do I get out of here?
posted by rikschell at 9:01 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


Try the elevator.
posted by flabdablet at 9:05 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm currently reading a novel that seems to be set in New England, based on descriptions of the ocean and the name of the town its set in. But it takes place in and around a business that is in a building that is variously described as a former convent, a former cathedral (not necessarily mutually exclusive, but the the building as it's described seems more like a cathedral than a convent), as being built in a Spanish Missionary style, and as having flying buttresses.

I found this extremely disorienting early on, but I've stuck with the book because I like the characters, and I've decided to accept that it's set in some kind of alternate universe where Spanish Missionaries built cathedrals with flying buttresses in New England towns with names like Norfolk.

This person's wandering in the maintenance side of the convention center evoked a similar sense of disorientation.
posted by Well I never at 9:05 AM on February 13, 2022 [9 favorites]


Should've sent a poet.
posted by ftm at 9:07 AM on February 13, 2022 [8 favorites]


I've been playing a lot of Disco Elysium and the whole thing is tripping me out something fierce.
posted by fight or flight at 9:09 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


Found the exit!
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:14 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


You are in a little maze of twisting passages, all different.
posted by flabdablet at 9:16 AM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]


The beige lodge?
posted by aesop at 9:20 AM on February 13, 2022 [9 favorites]


"Try hopping to the other set of steps!"
Yeah, why didn't he just rocket jump to the next level? I mean, yeah, he would've taken some damage, but he was pretty clean up till then.
posted by the sobsister at 9:22 AM on February 13, 2022 [7 favorites]


(note to self: always take graph paper for mapping purposes when going into unknown buildings)
posted by the sobsister at 9:23 AM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]


I have no idea how these people got wedged into this liminal space, or why.
posted by indexy at 9:23 AM on February 13, 2022 [19 favorites]


Once I took a flight from Toronto to Baltimore, and I was directed into the bare concrete maintenance corridors and stairways of Pearson Airport for what seemed far too long, into an empty terminal except for a handful of people sitting by one gate. There were 2 food trucks parked inside on the carpet, but they were unstaffed. Eventually an attendant appeared and led us out, not by the gate but through what appeared to be a fire door, onto the tarmac to a tiny commuter jet.
posted by rodlymight at 9:26 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


Rock & roll!
posted by Paul Slade at 9:28 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


You have an FPP on your left and an FPP to your right. It is Pitch Dark. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
posted by mcstayinskool at 9:31 AM on February 13, 2022 [10 favorites]


maybe i had to be there
posted by glonous keming at 9:31 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


Wow, once as a small child I got lost in a hotel like this. I suppose it's lucky he didn't encounter a little girl, in pyjamas, quietly weeping as she padded on bare feet through these liminal hallways
posted by The otter lady at 9:53 AM on February 13, 2022 [16 favorites]


I dunno, this kind of lost me as soon as the tweet with the stairs came up and they were like "WHY DO THESE STAIRS EXIST THE WAY THEY DO" and it's like, come on, it's clearly so they aren't cramming a ton of traffic into a single staircase, it's a conference centre and sometimes you need to move crowds of people to another place (possibly even for evacuation reasons) and it's really not that weird? But I guess go on with being all BUILDINGS HOW DO THEY WORK.

Though to be fair, I can't explain the peepholes later on.
posted by chrominance at 10:07 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


I suspect the peepholes are so you can check if the room is being used for a private eviscerating before you just walk in.
posted by The otter lady at 10:10 AM on February 13, 2022 [8 favorites]


I did a lot of event staffing while I was in school (back when Denver was poor) I staffed an event at this one very dodgy hotel and wandered into an unused area with 20 foot ceilings and wallpaper pealing off the walls in big sheets, it was both awesome and disturbing. I wish I had taken pictures. I miss that Denver.
posted by evilDoug at 10:11 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


I could totally believe this is the San Antonio convention center or something similar in size. It's so big it's set up as basically two regular-size convention centers and if there is only an event on one side the other side will be empty like this.
posted by muddgirl at 10:20 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


Oh! Also! When I arrived in Baltimore a friend was waiting to pick me up. Near the end as you go right from the doors, between a green car and a bus, they texted. Found the bus and car, but no sign of my friend. Walked end to end of the horseshoe concourse texting back and forth with my friend confusedly for a good 15 minutes, had I passed through that weird liminal space in Toronto into a twilight zone?

No, I was on the departures floor, it turned out. I don't know how I got there, it seemed like I walked out directly. Maybe the plane had debarked in a weird spot since it was so tiny? It really lended to the sense that the whole flight had been somehow illicit. I almost expected someone to say "But there hasn't been a direct flight from Toronto in 40 years…"
posted by rodlymight at 10:22 AM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]


I kinda love spaces like this. I used to work in the basement of a large hospital. The basement spanned and was shared by several buildings (at least 5) so it was huge, yet looked exactly the same throughout. There were two parallel halls that were extremely long, but were not joined to each other in a regular or predictable way, and each had its own offshoots to get to other long halls to other buildings. Even though I worked down there for years, I would still get turned around sometimes and forget which hall I was on, or which direction on it I was heading. Occasionally I'd find visitors lost down there and have to take them to safety. Perhaps my favorite oddness of it was that to get to one of the loading docks (there were at least 3 in 3 different buildings) you had to take an elevator down to a sub-basement, walk a ways, and then take a different freight elevator up to the dock. I'm sure there was a better way to get there, but I never found it.
posted by ghharr at 10:22 AM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]


did anyone bring a 10' pole?
posted by clavdivs at 10:26 AM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]


Tweets are no longer available, looks like the poster made their account private. Maybe someone archived it?
posted by ockmockbock at 10:26 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


Tweets are no longer available, looks like the poster made their account private. Maybe someone archived it?

The twitter thread has been archived here on threadreader.
posted by fight or flight at 10:35 AM on February 13, 2022


Oh, that would explain the cryptic "this tweet cannot be retweeted" message I got.

There's a working Threadreader link in a parallel thread.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:36 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]




breadcrumbs. not doin that trip without breadcrumbs.
posted by j_curiouser at 10:51 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


What is the purpose behind these dramatically overbuilt, underutilized spaces? Future expansion plans? Resource sink / jobs program? It's just so bizarre to me that places like this get built in the first place.

My first thought was “Will has never worked at a university” because, honestly, SO many of the university buildings I’ve worked in have had elements of this. The biggest reason was usually that the building was originally built for one purpose but is now being used for another. I’ve worked in some bizarrely cobbled-together spaces, with elevators and staircases that don’t open on every floor. Legend had it that the admin building where one half didn’t communicate with the other was designed that way so protesting students couldn’t take over the building again like they had in the Sixties.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:57 AM on February 13, 2022 [15 favorites]


I love stories where the space itself is a character. Ankh morepork, Gormenghast, perdito st station, the death star...

I've long wanted to dm a Sci fi campaign where the entire setting is one large starship.
posted by rebent at 10:59 AM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]


a private eviscerating

If you're doing that to the privates, that would be an emasculating or defeminating.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:01 AM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]


One of my first library jobs was in book distribution at the Cincinnati Public Library. I think they do this so you quickly learn the mazelike warren of the employee-only closed stacks areas. Here's a video [watch at 25% playback speed for a more real-time effect]
posted by indexy at 11:02 AM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]


If they could open a Jersey Mikes down there, it would become a subliminal space.
posted by dr_dank at 11:04 AM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]


Getting to my office at my last university job felt like the opening sequence from Get Smart. And you had to go through an area of the basement known as "The Zigzag."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:12 AM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


Her: "Oh you're in the stairs! And you're in pretty deep. Try hopping to the other set of steps!"
Me: *confused and asking why*
Her: "Yeah the building is built like half and half so one set of stairs is for the maintenance side and one set is for the public side."
Interestingly, it seems like the topology here was intentionally set up like one of those labyrinths that are designed not to be simply connected in order to defeat the right-hand rule (where you keep your hand against the wall while walking in order to find your way out). In this case, they keep the outsider and insider topologies adjacent but not actually intersecting, so that as with a multiply-connected maze, at some point you have to take the leap and jump to the other wall/path.
posted by chortly at 11:20 AM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]


I've long wanted to dm a Sci fi campaign where the entire setting is one large starship.

I did this back in High School. The players kept fucking around with the wrong wall panels and blowing themselves out into space. It was glorious.
posted by mikelieman at 11:30 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


One of the last conferences I went to in the Before Times was in one of these massive conference centers. The problem was that the conference was really too small to need all the space, so it was just miles of quiet, sparsely populated carpet dotted with people exhaustedly trying to get from one room to another. It felt like I walked miles every day of it.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:44 AM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


I've long wanted to dm a Sci fi campaign where the entire setting is one large starship.

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks can be a crapload of fun if you're playing D&D.
posted by Sphinx at 11:44 AM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


I love weird places like these. I got lost in MoMA last year. We were putting up a big set for an awards show and working after closing. The freight elevator we'd taken up was done for the day. I got lost in stairs and stairs and ended up encountering a very bored security guard hanging next to a small door to the rest of the world with broken glass. She gave me terse and terrible directions and I ended up riding an elevator to floors that I didn't know existed. When I finally found a door out, I looked spooked enough that the security guard on the way out laughed and told me it took him months to find his way around the place, that there are doors that don't look like doors and passages all over. That guy was awesome.
posted by lauranesson at 12:06 PM on February 13, 2022 [10 favorites]


I’ve worked in some bizarrely cobbled-together spaces, with elevators and staircases that don’t open on every floor.

Every place I’ve ever worked in academia, including where I work now, has had a set of lab buildings that were built separately and then awkwardly fused together, such that floor 3 on some building is coterminous with floor 5 in another, and some of the elevators only go between certain ranges of floors. Often there are also weird subterranean tunnels (so that you don’t have to badge out, wheel samples outside, and then badge in; people love to put autoclaves and shit down here which make extra foreboding clanks and beeps when you are alone). In multiple cases, it looks like one building has actually endocytosed another — there’s a second exterior built around the original exterior, so that you go inside the first set of doors and then are in a high-ceilinged concourse with the original facade of the interior building. It reminds me a little of that Jungian (?) palimpsest thing about the Roman cathedral built on top of an older church built on top of an early Christian gathering place built on top of a pagan altar above a tiny stream that remains undisturbed deep in the building’s recesses. And also it reminds me of this Twitter thread.
posted by en forme de poire at 12:11 PM on February 13, 2022 [16 favorites]


awkwardly fused together, such that floor 3 on some building is coterminous with floor 5 in another

Old hospitals are like this too, with new wings being bolted on every few dozen years with wildly different internal and external arrangements. I always felt like the overall effect from outside is of an expanding and differentiating tumour, which is an unfortunate impression to give off.
posted by saturday_morning at 12:28 PM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]


Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or something.
posted by en forme de poire at 12:29 PM on February 13, 2022 [11 favorites]


Unlike many people in this thread, I've never experienced a place like this in real life. But, I have had so, so many dreams where I'm wandering, slightly lost or completely lost, through buildings comprised of endless hallways, strange open spaces, catwalks, tunnels, and so on. They all form a slightly hazy but still mappable geography…a university and its buildings, a hospital, a shopping mall, tall buildings like in japan with multiple storefronts lining the edge of each floor. I can even picture the streets, their buildings and contained businesses, and the arrangement of the highways around this unnamed city. I thought this was a common thing everyone experiences, until I asked my wife if she ever has dreams like that. "Never."
posted by jabah at 12:33 PM on February 13, 2022 [11 favorites]


until I asked my wife if she ever has dreams like that. "Never."

Were any of the buildings in your dreams cyclopian in nature? Did any of the hallways or streets have an uncomfortable non-euclidian aspect to them? Asking for a friend.
posted by valkane at 12:39 PM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]


Update: the Roman site I was thinking of is the Basilica of St. Clement, described in amazing effect here. It was Freud who talked about Rome, not Jung (at least, not first), and I don't think he actually wrote about this specific case. The article contains this line:
During my Fulbright year in Italy I had a colleague who was studying Roman altars, half of which you could only get at by ringing the bell of strangers’ apartments and saying: “Hello! I’m an archaeologist, and according to this list there’s a Roman sacrificial altar here?” to which the standard response is, “Oh, yes, come on in, it’s in the basement next to the washing machine.” I have another friend who thinks he’s found a lost chapel frescoed by a major Renaissance artist hidden in an elevator shaft. Another friend once told me of a pizza place with a trap door down to not-yet-tallied catacombs. I believe it.
...and would be FPP-worthy in its own right except that it turns out that I probably read about it on Metafilter in 2013 thanks to Paragon. Presumably that thread contains a link to an even older thread, which contains a link to something you can only read on archive.org, which contains a link to a page that gives the coordinates to a room in your house you've never visited.
posted by en forme de poire at 12:52 PM on February 13, 2022 [16 favorites]


Jokes aside, they should do something about the signage before somebody gets seriously hurt. I recall now a story about an elderly lady who died when she was trapped in a corridor at the Boston Public Library. I don't have a good link, but apparently maintenance wasn't doing the check they were supposed to, and her body wasn't found for twenty-two days. This was the 70s, when it was easier to get lost, but still.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:04 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


Well this is weird. Apparently someone with my username is in the other mirror thread making posts but every time I click on the link to open it, this thread opens instead.

Whoever that is over there isn't me and if I meet them I'm probably going to kick their ass.
posted by loquacious at 1:31 PM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]


Whoever that is over there isn't me and if I meet them I'm probably going to kick their ass.

Meanwhile, in the thread you can only get to if you’re on the other set of stairs, other-loquacious is thinking about the possibility of the existence of not-other-loquacious, and their activities in this thread, the thread they feel exists, but cannot be certain of, and thinks:

Whoever that is over there isn't me and if I meet them I'm probably going to give them such a hug.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:47 PM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


I look forward to a future Doubles Jubilee in which each of these threads is revisited twice. Exponential Jubilee!
posted by Comet Bug at 1:52 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


'At the center of floor is a tinderbox.'
_examine tinderbox
-move forward
-examine door
-other
posted by clavdivs at 2:15 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


No one else has mentioned a problem, but when I select the link, Twitter tells me the tweet has been deleted.
posted by Jackson at 2:17 PM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]


It's the Mindflayer!
posted by clavdivs at 2:19 PM on February 13, 2022


Might I suggest that every Feb 13 there's a chaotic double-meta-post?
posted by pepcorn at 2:19 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


there’s a second exterior built around the original exterior, so that you go inside the first set of doors and then are in a high-ceilinged concourse with the original facade of the interior building.

I had an office in an addition like this! The room was shaped roughly like the state of Idaho, with the curved wall being the stone blocks of the original façade and the straight walls being standard tan-painted drywall. The HVAC was never quite right because the space had originally been designed as library stacks before being subdivided into offices.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:22 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


Might I suggest that every Feb 13 there's a chaotic double-meta-post?

I don't know what everyone's talking about. There's only one post here. One huge.. empty.. poorly carpeted post. Right? Just take the stairs down and hop to the other level. You're still in the same place. You haven't gone anywhere. There's nothing else except the post. The one post. Endlessly.
posted by fight or flight at 2:27 PM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


These Tweets are protectedOnly approved followers can see @YearoutWilliam’s Tweets. To request access, click Follow. Learn more!

ok, ZIPPITY!
posted by clavdivs at 2:31 PM on February 13, 2022


No one else has mentioned a problem, but when I select the link, Twitter tells me the tweet has been deleted.

It's been mentioned upthread! The threadreader version has been linked a few times in the comments. Climb the stairs up and take a left.
posted by fight or flight at 2:36 PM on February 13, 2022


You are everywhere and you are nowhere. Welcome to The Dreaming. Whatever you do, do not jump to the other stairs. If this pocket universe collapses while you are still inside, we cannot be held responsible for the consequences.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:38 PM on February 13, 2022




All of which to say, I've clambered over two stair rails of unequal heights to save myself from climbing back up three flights of stairs to get where I was going.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 2:53 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


We’ve always been the caretaker.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:56 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


Well this is weird. Apparently someone with my username is in the other mirror thread making posts but every time I click on the link to open it, this thread opens instead.

Whoever that is over there isn't me and if I meet them I'm probably going to kick their ass.


I'd be careful if I were you, loquacious--your doppelganger seems more confident, successful, and better looking than you. But only you can see that something is off and wrong, and why can't anyone else see that? Not me, though. I'm one of the many people who have flagged your posts in this thread as being an obvious sockpuppet trying to harm the reputation of the marvelous and dreamy and so obviously real loquacious in the other thread.
posted by indexy at 2:58 PM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


Threadreader version doesn’t work. Two posts dedicated to a deleted tweet, so it goes.
posted by betweenthebars at 3:44 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


Threadreader version doesn’t work. Two posts dedicated to a deleted tweet, so it goes.

Indeed. See the meta.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 3:45 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]




This is why I always exit a building through a window.
posted by mollweide at 4:07 PM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]


Threadreader version doesn’t work. Two posts dedicated to a deleted tweet, so it goes.

But after he escaped, indexy tried for years to find the way back to the backroom area. But there was no evidence such a place had ever existed. And then one day in an old archive...
posted by indexy at 4:08 PM on February 13, 2022


My middle school was a building from the 1920s or so with various additions piled on over the 20th century more than tripling its' original size. It had a fallout shelter underneath that was sometimes used as a subterranean archery range. I could memorize routes from place to place but I never really formed a spatial understanding of how everything related. There was an Olympic size pool with bleachers and a separate diving pool -- i have no idea how or where it fit within the overall structure.

It was torn down several years ago but I still dream about it from time to time, mutated into even more bizarre variations.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:48 PM on February 13, 2022 [6 favorites]


"My first thought was 'Will has never worked at a university' because, honestly, SO many of the university buildings I’ve worked in have had elements of this."

Yeah, this very strongly evokes a large part of my childhood growing up in a college town with both parents working at the university.

I'm by nature a solitary explorer, a night owl, was not much mindful of adults' rules or restricted spaces or even physical obstacles that could be climbed over or under or forced aside. Want to run around the court of the basketball arena at 2AM? Sure, I can show you which emergency fire exit door could be forced open from the outside.

I had little or no interest in any stuff — the clutter of offices or supply closets or labs or ordinary classrooms were beside the point. The point was traversing unknown or empty territory. Long hallways, unmarked connecting doors, echoing stairways, exploring spaces... that was the point.

From the great distance of the back-end of my fifties, not to mention now being disabled, I feel a powerful sense of nostalgia and of something vital which has been lost.

This guy had an unexpected childhood adventure as an adult and we should all be so lucky.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:09 PM on February 13, 2022 [13 favorites]


I’ve worked in some bizarrely cobbled-together spaces, with elevators and staircases that don’t open on every floor.

I have dreams set in places like that where it isn't possible to get to my goal, or I have to take an intricate convoluted route through/around many obstacles to do so.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:33 PM on February 13, 2022 [3 favorites]


paper chromatographologist, the K-12 where I attended high school was also a Frankenschule, with the original structure built in 1911, a major expansion built by the WPA in the 1930s, a sprawling open-plan elementary wing added in the 1960s (and soon thereafter divided back up into traditional classrooms) and tech classrooms and a “modern” gym and pool tacked on in the 1970’s. Each addition was done in a slightly different shade of yellow brick, I assume whatever they could find that was closest to what the previous builders used. Pictures online from this century show that it’s all been painted a bright white, which just looks really weird.

The original circa 1900 farmhouse that went with the land that was donated to the school, and was operated as a museum when I was a student there, is still standing but now boarded up. We used to go there once a year and crowd into the the parlor to hear our Grade 11 English teacher give a lecture dressed as Mark Twain. She had the white suit but was otherwise not too convincing.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:27 PM on February 13, 2022 [4 favorites]


If you find yourself at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas check out the exit staircases in the pyramid. They are wild because they look nothing like a normal staircase so that they can accommodate the slanted exterior of the building.

Also, check out the Liminal Spaces Bot on twitter which is a great follow to get weird, strange, haunting, unusual photos.
posted by mmascolino at 8:43 PM on February 13, 2022 [2 favorites]


The April Fools' version of this would have each of these threads' comment boxes exclusively post to the opposite thread.
posted by nobody at 8:43 PM on February 13, 2022 [13 favorites]


I am so lost.
posted by Mchelly at 9:01 PM on February 13, 2022 [1 favorite]


Neat.

Bit confused why the guy didn't just follow the big illuminated "EXIT" signs, though. I mean, I know they sort of fade into the background because we're used to seeing them everywhere, but they do serve a function. Follow them, and you will end up outside. Maybe in an alley next to the trash compactor or something, but outside.

When I used to do a lot of business travel (like 30+ weeks/year), I started to get increasingly bored with regular suburban Hilton/Marriott hotels, and started booking rooms in the weirdest places I could find. Generally, whatever appeared to be the oldest hotel in the nearest major city. At the same time, I had just acquired a Fitbit and was on something of a quest to get my "steps" in every day. This led to a lot of nighttime wandering (you can only entertain yourself on a treadmill for so long, or at least I can).

Several of the buildings had strange, underused areas as the result of multiple renovations and refacings, where you could see the older iterations of the building peeking through. Old mail and trash chutes, disused incinerators, 1970s brown/orange/cream paint schemes, Civil Defense fallout shelter signage... great stuff.

The trick to finding most of them was usually just to start somewhere, begin following exit signs, and see where they led. Eventually I'd invariably end up at the street, or at an alarmed door that led to the street, and that would be the end of the game.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:17 PM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]


To have an even more phantasmagorical experience, get lost in the Behind World in a wheelchair. All exits end in stairs.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 7:20 AM on February 14, 2022


Re: universities

When I was 16 I spent the summer at Caltech. They have steam tunnels running all around under campus. I'm at a long summer program with a bunch of nerds, and well the entire place is basically a bit of nerd heaven. So naturally one night we get to a door that leads to the twisty tunnels. They are covered all about with decades and decades worth of bad poetry, song lyrics, nerd graffiti like an Escher sketch. While exploring around we find an old clue from a scavenger hunt that got missed. So we follow it and end up at a locked door. Next time.... we (ahem) borrow a master key from one of the undergrads, go through the door into the basement of the library (the newest/tallest building on campus) and ride to the roof. Where we find under a wooden pallet a single bottle of St. Pauli Girl Dark beer that been up there for maybe half a year. We drink it anyway.

We explored almost every inch of those tunnels over that summer just looking to find what's on the other side of the door. Towards the end, we wake up and go out to the roof of the library again and somebody has brought a boom-box and patiently waits until just the right moment to start playing Ravel's Bolero... timed to get to the end during sunrise. Then we mad dash back to the dorms because um.... daylight.

But yeah, universities, weird things. Go this way and you're in the basement of this other dorm and there's a large gym-like group shower area.... Instant second visit Pool Party.

Fun times.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:26 AM on February 14, 2022 [5 favorites]


Oh, no. I think I'm trapped!
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:28 AM on February 14, 2022 [1 favorite]


I was working a tempt gig at McCormick place, the giant convention center in Chicago. We are in the north building and needed to go down to gate 26 to get some gear, and someone suggests using the secret smoking area to quickly get there. Checking the map confirms that the smoking area on the north east corner of the south building isn't far from the gate so we set off. One of our party decides to go get a meal and says that he'll catch up with us at the gate.

We briefly get lost, but a smoker points us to the secret exit and we find ourselves at the designated smoking zone. It's on the third level! There's several unmarked doors, but they are all locked. A friendly fellow on the other side opens it up, see's our worker id's and waves us in. Rather than admit we shouldn't be there at all we thank him and take the first stairs down. Down one level. Down another. We can hear traffic so we know we are close, but there is just a big hallway. Like truck sized big, but not well lit. Totally deserted. So we decide on a direction and head off. And walk a bit. Too far, and now we are discussing the scope of the issue. It's quiet now.

There is the type of lost where you don't know how to get to your destination. And the type where you don't know your current location, and the third type, the totally lost where you don't know how to get back. And that's when we heard a train. I had only recently moved to the area, the rest where from the Twin Cities and beyond. But we knew, intuitively, that a train was not right. A poorly lit exit sign by a double door let us out onto Mines st, teaming with people prepping for a different convention. Had we travelled through time? Dentists were later....but we quickly figured out this is the dental equipment manufacturer trade show being held in the south building, ours is just up a bit in the north building. Off we go.

Sitting in dock 26 all by himself was our remaining member of the party. He looks relieved to see us but also mad. Turns out you can't unload even relatively small items at the gates, our equipment was sitting in the loading docks. But we didn't know which one - the north docks were all the way north, and the south docs were down past where we had just been. Fun times.
posted by zenon at 1:04 PM on February 14, 2022 [5 favorites]


Help!
posted by Marticus at 1:06 PM on February 15, 2022 [3 favorites]


I have an incredibly bad sense of direction, and let me tell you these threads feel like the inside of my head when I'm lost. I'm concerned and a little frightened, but also I feel SO SEEN right now!
posted by Space Kitty at 6:06 PM on February 15, 2022 [4 favorites]


That will be the security cameras, I expect.
posted by flabdablet at 6:47 PM on February 15, 2022 [6 favorites]


An update.

Was it real? Was it entirely a work of "immersive fiction"? Does it matter? Is the hotel still holding him somewhere in its echoing halls? Who can say..
posted by fight or flight at 8:14 AM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


flabdablet - a week later and this is still cracking me up.
posted by Space Kitty at 10:55 AM on February 23, 2022


IMO it's safest to assume that any viral Twitter thread is a tall tale at best.
posted by muddgirl at 11:02 AM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


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