A bad situation with no good solution

Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill building in New York City for forty-one hours. Click the post title to go to the New Yorker magazine site and watch the video of his incarceration (or here, or here to read the article by Nick Paumgarten):
"The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs. The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped... Forty-one hours later, they came for him; when he finally got out, White told a guard, “Somebody could’ve died in there.” “I know,” the guard said... White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention (which he shunned but thrilled to), prodded by friends, and perhaps provoked by overly solicitous overtures from McGraw-Hill, White fell under the sway of renown and grievance, and then that of the legal establishment. He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures. He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed."

Rico says he'd have tried something, anything, a little more drastic to get out, long before that. (I mean, surely you gotta take a dump inside of forty hours, right? Though it seems White forced the doors open enough to piss down the shaft...) But it seems the escape hatch was locked from the outside; not nice, even if it is the law, to keep kids from 'elevator surfing', the morons.
Rico didn't have the same impetus behind his own sea change, but, he, too, no longer has a job, has lost contact with almost all my former colleagues, lost his apartment (but, fortunately, was taken in by his ladyfriend), spent all his money, and is currently (though happily, in his case) unemployed, except for his government check...