A medical student who found himself stuck in an elevator before his first surgery didn’t resort to panic — he resorted to Snapchat.
The student, Joseph, appears to have been at Mon General Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia when the elevator he was riding alone got stuck.
While he waited an hour for assistance, he documented the experience for his social media followers. Since a friend shared his snaps on Imgur, they have delighted thousands of people on the internet.
Yikes: A Reddit user named Joseph found himself stuck in a hospital elevator recently
No fun: A medical student at Mon General Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia, he was on his way to his first surgery
When the elevator doors didn’t open, Joseph immediately began Snapchatting, first sharing an image of the doors — which were stuck at just and inch or two ajar.
‘Day 1, Minute 10,’ he wrote. ‘Is this what hell feels like?’
Joseph shared an image on his own face, eyebrows raised. Dressed in his white lab coat with his stethoscope around his neck, he seemed ready to get to work but found the situation quickly fall outside of his control.
‘If someone else was on here with me, I would have already resorted to cannibalism,’ he joked just 15 minutes in.
After about 20 minutes, he said he was about to ‘start MacGyvering my way through the ceiling’.
Castaway: He began Snapchatting updates, joking about being stranded, even comparing himself to Tom Hanks’ character in the movie Cast Away (right)
Competitive: He joked that his beard has grown long but his laptop — which he named Wilson, like the volleyball in Castaway — had a better one
He didn’t, though, actually attempt to escape through the top.
‘Gonna chop my arm off with a pocked knife soon,’ he wrote at minute 25. ‘It’s not trapped in anything. I’m just running out of ideas.’
Joseph seemed to be quite bored in the elevator and was desperate for entertainment — which he certainly found on Snapchat.
Nearly a half hour in, he joked that he’d renamed his laptop Wilson — the name that Tom Hanks’ Cast Away character gave to his only companion, a volleyball — and a few minutes later, he whipped out a pen to write on the wall.
Playing around: He also quipped about the terrible conditions in the elevator
Phew! Finally, after an hour, maintenance workers came to the rescue
‘Scratching out the solar and lunar cycle so I can keep track of the date,’ he said.
‘My beard has already grown so much since becoming stranded,’ he wrote at minute 37.
At minute 43, he said he had decided ‘to eat Wilson,’ and at minute 50 he shared a picture of himself and said he had ‘fashioned this headdress out of my scrubs to battle the sweltering burns from fluorescent lights’.
Finally, a full hour after getting stuck, he was able to share a snap of two maintenance workers opening the doors.
‘I’m saved!’ he wrote. ‘I must now reintegrate into society. ‘But I’ve been so long without human contact. Will I even remember how to speak? How to love?’