Monday, November 27, 2006

The every-other-step rule

On the up-escalator today, a woman with a huge backpack violated the every-other step rule and almost caused a dangerous downward domino affect. She was clueless. She was SO fickle about where she wanted to stand on the escalator. She looked like she was about to take on the step that is two steps above mine but then suddenly changed her mind and just casually and cluelessly took one step down.

As she did that, her oversized backpack pushed my face! She had no clue! I lost my balance. I was tipping backwards. My torso leaned backwards unnaturally in a desperate attempt to hold my body upright without causing the passengers behind me to fall over. Luckily, the man in back of me saw what happened and anticipated that I would be stepping backwards to hold my balance. So, he stepped back, right when I suddenly placed one foot back to hold my body upright.

This woman had no clue what she did and just walked out of the station.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey, just ran across your blog, which reminded me of a similar blog that I kept a few years ago ... looking back to what I wrote, I have to admit that _some_ things have improved on BART in the past few years.
http://lifewithbart.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

This kind of thing pissed me off. It doesn't take a genius to realize you're on an escalator with dozens of other people.

I push back (hard!) and yell "watch it!" when people do this to me.

If the backpack is really big I've found shoving them sideways or even trying to kick the back of their calf works too. You have to be fast though, once they fully step back you're screwed....

Anonymous said...

Many of these people with backpacks are just plain clueless. They don't seem to understand that they have this thing on their backs that sticks out sometimes nearly a foot and that swings around whenever they turn. People near them regularly get battered by these packs. They also don't seem to want to take them off and put them on the floor when on crowded trains so end up taking up close to twice as much space.