“Ring, relax and wait” is the elevator safety chant introduced in 2009 to schoolchildren by New York City Department of Buildings commissioner Robert D. LiMandri. Several fatal elevator accidents had occurred, prompting the elevator maxim.
 
When a person is stuck in an elevator, the accepted DOB procedure is to ring the elevator bell, and then to relax and wait for help. Children were discouraged from attempting to open the elevator doors themselves or from climbing out of the elevator.
 
 
New York (NY) Times
Children Learn a Maxim in Case an Elevator Gets Stuck: ‘Ring, Relax and Wait’
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: November 9, 2009
It was the New York City version of elementary-school earthquake drills in small-town California: survival skills for vertical living.
 
The city’s buildings commissioner, Robert D. LiMandri, and elevator inspectors from the Department of Buildings led 150 schoolchildren at P.S. 19 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a chant on Monday, repeated over and over, and then over and over once more.
 
“I want you to remember three words, O.K.?” Mr. LiMandri told an auditorium of 7- and 8-year-old boys and girls. “When you’re stuck in an elevator, you do three things. Say it out loud with me: Ring, relax and wait. Don’t jump out. Ring, relax and wait, and someone will come for you, O.K.?”
(...)
The “ring, relax and wait” mantra, which Mr. LiMandri said he wanted to become as common and as widespread as the “stop, drop and roll” fire safety technique, seemed to sink in.