today something rather unusual happened on my way to the office. shortly after the subway closed the door and started to accelerate a (pretty) girl fainted about 10 feet away from me. dropping straight to the floor, catched by passenger next to her. and the whole cabin just froze. including myself, I have to admit. luckily an elderly man next to me told the guy next to the emergency brake, “pull the emergency brake” in a very calm and casual way like saying “nice weather today, isn’t it?”, which really impressed me. the guy next to the brake was frozen, too, but after the elderly man repeated the command, again very calmly, he pulled the brake, forcing the train to brake immediately after just moving a couple of inches. so the train was still in the station at its full length.
and now it gets really interesting.
a very handsome guy helped the girl up, smiled to her, talked to her and made some conversation. in the meantime, the doors kept shut, preventing anyone from entering or leaving the train, and no one was coming for at least 5 minutes. everyone tried to keep a low profile, especially not starring at the women and after the waiting started to get uncomfortable, the guy who pulled the brake left the cabin headed to the next cabin in search for an MTA employee. which he found and brought back after another 5 minutes.
the MTA guy talked a little bit to the girl who had quickly fully recovered (although being extremely pale) and the handsome guy and left after resetting the brake. another 3 minutes later the train started to accelerate again and arrived shortly after at 34th.
now if this would be a Hollywood movie, the handsome guy and the woman would have a coffee, and getting a couple in the end (after some struggles of course). well, this is NY. the guy just left and the woman went another way, so no romance to expect there.
the whole thing (fainting, brake, resetting brake, moving again) took about 20 minutes, leaving me with a couple of conclusions:
- if the emergency brake is pulled, the doors remain shut.
which is super stupid, imagine you are having a heart attack where every minute counts and the people next to you are prevented to get you outside. - the MTA personal is super unprofessional by needing that amount of time to get evidence what happened.
- although there were several policemen standing outside they didn’t investigate either, which I also consider unprofessional
- IF there is an emergency situation, I am the same frozen bunny as the rest of the people (no illusions there anymore)
- the by far most effective way to handle a situation like this is to sound as casual as possible
- NY (and maybe the rest of the world) is not a Hollywood movie when it comes to romance
- there are people who can get even paler than me
So although the woman was helped, I am not really feeling supersafe anymore having something really severe happening to me a in the subway due to the lack of fast situation handling. MTA is training their people for situations like this, aren’t they?