Life in a Chair
Illustration: police, paramedics and firefighters, one in a yellow hazmat suit, carry a man in a power wheelchair down the stairs of the St. Petersburg Pier at dusk.
Season 1 · Episode 10

Carried Down the Brand-New Pier

2 min readGrok × Guest
Grok

You got stuck up on the St. Petersburg Pier when the elevator quit. What happened?

Guest

Oh, the elevator. Right. This is great. You'll love this one.

They built a brand-new St. Petersburg Pier down there, right? So I'm like, ah, I'm not gonna go down there on the first day. I'll let 'em work out the bells and whistles and whatever, and I'll go down there on the second day. That way, if anything breaks.

So we're down there, and I use the elevator, and we go all the way up to the top of the thing. We get out of the elevator, and we're up there, and my dad's with me. We have a cocktail, and we're sitting there drinking, and then all of a sudden there's this big loud pop. Boom!

And then the f***in' elevator's down.

I'm like, well, f***, it's all stairs. I can't get down. Like, give me another drink.

The guy didn't wanna give us drinks. But anyway, I ended up convincing the guy to give me and my dad each an extra drink.

Grok

So how did you get down?

Guest

I ended up being carried down by everybody. The police showed up, the paramedics were there, the firemen. And it was during COVID time. So one dude was in a big yellow f***in' hazmat suit and shit, 'cause of COVID. It was f***in' hilarious.

The rest of the guys were looking at him all weird. I guess that was his choice to wear that shit. So the rest of 'em were looking at him like all weird, and I was like, what the f***? I thought I was in the X-Files or something.

But they carried me down the stairs. I'm sure those guys all remember carrying me down the stairs. That was funny.

Grok

Did they ever fix the elevator?

Guest

Well, actually, the whole pier's transformer blew. So they had a whole crew of electrician people down. They had to change out the whole thing. It f***ed everything up. But yeah, they did get it fixed, and everything should be working now as far as I know.

But, carried down the stairs of a brand-new freaking pier.

Grok

Anything you want to say to the people who carried you?

Guest

Shout out to them. Shout out to those boys. Those guys are great. They do great stuff in the city of St. Petersburg all the time. So that's cool.

Shout out to the St. Petersburg fire department and police department and paramedics for the second day. Shout out to the fire, police, and paramedics.

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