Nosebleed seats

It's hard to say exactly how many people suffer from a fear of heights.

In fact, it's really hard. The American Psychiatric Association only has information on its own members, and while it might be fun to learn how many psychiatrists suffer from acrophobia, it's really not what I was looking for.

The National Center for Health Statistics sounded like a good bet for an answer. Nope. But they did send me to the National Health Information Center, which pushed me to the National Institute of Mental Health, which, in turn, referred me back to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The rather stoic gentleman from the National Institute of Mental Health claimed only to be a messenger when I wondered aloud how it could be so difficult to find such simple statistics. Maybe acrophobic people suffer from a secondary fear of reporting their fear.

I did discover a random Web site of unknown credibility reporting that five out of every 100 people suffer from acrophobia. But really, all I can say with any sense of certainty is that I'm not afraid of heights.

Although, standing at 5 feet 9 inches on a tall day, I tend to live my life pretty close to the ground.

So, in the end, I failed to come up with a clever fact showing how many people in the world would feel their throats constrict and cold sweat break out on their foreheads if they found themselves at the top of Taipei 101, the world's tallest building standing at 1,670 feet and 101 stories in Taiwan.

I'm also disheartened to report that I couldn't find out if anyone standing atop said tower could reasonably expect to suffer from a nosebleed. I also don't know what the weather's like up there, if the people who built it actually felt like they had risen to the challenge or what it might be like to really have your head in the clouds.

But I hit gold with Eric Buschick, a service superintendent for Schindler Elevator Corp. in Menomonee Falls.

This guy knows elevators up and down. He said that three years ago he was a superintendent for the installation of observatory deck elevators in the Sears Tower (fourth on the tallest building list at 110 stories and 1,450 feet).

These are the Cadillacs of elevators. They run at 1,800 feet per minute, which is roughly 20 mph. That means that if one of those elevators is in Taipei 101 (couldn't get that fact either), a rider going from the bottom to the top might expect a ride of about 55.67 seconds.

I might not know much, but that sure seems like a pretty fast way to get to the top of a pretty tall building.