An abandoned bag on the subway train this morning

[KurtNYC]

I see an awful lot of people everyday. Hundreds on the sidewalks, in lines, in their cars, on the subway. And I wonder what is going on inside their heads, especially this morning.

The shuttle train pulls into Time Square around 8AM this morning(it just goes back and forth between two stations all day). The doors open and everyone gets off. As I step on I see a guy dash off the train leaving behind a large blue bag! He dashes off the train so I get off as well. This is exactly the behavior of one of last week's would-be bombers in London, the one who was chased. Here is the weird part - other people continue to get on this train car and stand right by the bag, totally oblivious and unconcerned!

So I'm looking around the platform for a cop. In spite of what they say on the news, there aren't any. I'm looking for where the bag dropper went. And I'm pretty sure he went through a make-shift door into an employee-only area of the station. The adreniline starts shooting through me -- Do I yell at the idiots who got on the train and stayed there? Go searching for a cop (and get the whole station shut down and in a panic)? Just get my own ass out of there?

Nope...here comes the bag dropper. He is an MTA contractor who had left his bag on the train for 90 seconds while running into the contractors office near the shuttle train. Has he 1) not heard about London? 2)not seen any bag searches, etc for the past week? 3) never had his tools ripped off when he left them on a busy train ? And what about every person besides me who got on that train and stood next to an abandoned bag?

So at times likes this I am back to my question - What the hell is going on in other people's heads? And what use are these zoned-out people going to be if there are more attacks here? It is as if people literally will not pay attention to their surroundings even if their life may depend on it.

[King Coal]

1. You did the right thing Kurt.

Don't think differently for a second.

[havocmom]

2. "What the hell is going on in other people's heads?"

How enthralling last night's reality show de jour was.

How much better their life would be as soon as they can afford all the stuff they saw commercials for while watching the reality show de jour.

How nasty their boss is (but NEVER getting around to thinking about the root causes of nasty boss behavior.)

How tired they always are (again, never figuring out the root causes).

How much safer they are than the people in London, cuz b*sh and the media keeps telling them things are OK

[KurtNYC]

5. Sadly that seems about right

[undergroundpanther]

3. People are dead inside

They just are too distracted,obedient, over worked and in their own worlds of do this, than move to the next task to waste attention on a mysterious bag.Or maybe they saw MTA people do that before..I dunno.

Most humans are domesticated to the point of losing themselves in the same old routine and task..almost like prey waiting for death to take them away from their lives not really lived.
I dunno. I think people are too overwhelmed and unconsiously suicidal and are taught to be powerless ruled by harsh internalized parents and convinced they are victims and see no way out,they just do,think and will not feel .

I dunno that was my first thought when you said this.

[Siena]

4. That's NY for you...

I find myself thinking that very thing every single day. The other day on the subway, I overheard a conversation between 2 adult women that went something like this:

Woman 1: yeah i heard about that whole deal with roberts getting on the supreme court

woman 2: oh they took him?

woman 2: yeah woman! why you always gotta be so ignorant!

bottom line - most people will spend their entire life with their head up their ass.

for more fun overheard conversations in NY, follow this link:

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/

[Beetwasher]

6. The Searches Are Also A Joke

It's only at selected stations, like that's going to do anything.

No searches for instance at Borough Hall in Brooklyn, so what's the point? A terrorist can (and would) get on at a stop where there's no searches. It's so stupid.

[Tesha]

12. Shhh! Don't tell the terraists!

> A terrorist can (and would) get on at a stop where there's no searches. It's so stupid.

Shhh! Don't tell the terraists! We're counting on the fact that they
are as stoopid as our Fearless Leader, so if they see one armed
station, they'll just assume they're all armed and not actually
check out all the other stations for themselves!

Tesha

[Love Bug]

7. Why don't you send this to the NY Times as a letter to the editor?

[GreenPartyVoter]

8. Good idea

[KurtNYC]

10. What I want to do is relay to the contractor's supervisor

that their people should be more aware of something like this and avoid causing some kind of mass panic which is potentially as dangerous as an attack. People in the London tube were described as "climbing over each other's backs" trying to get out of the tube carriage. And there ha been concern here about the new floor to ceiling turnstiles which will bottleneck any kind of evacuation.

MTA contractors should know how to avoid this. NYers in general, I think, have had plenty of time and events to sort out their personal response to all this. People's attitudes seem to run the gammit from scaring themselves silly down to 'if it happens it happens' Not sure an LTTE would change that.

[unrepuke]

9. Every great Once-In-A-While a piece of pipe falls off a plumbing truck

on the freeway here, in L.A., and the cops shut down half the world, until the End Of Shift, examining it and blowing it up with a robot.
99.44% of the time everybody ignores everything.
If Al Quaida wanted us, they'd have had us years ago.

[KurtNYC]

11. when I worked for a certain movie studio

which shall remain nameless, they were doing a promotion for 'Speed 2' and they were going to use a prop bomb on a bus which would pull up to the premiere. One of the exec left this prop bomb on his desk overnight.... Well the cleaning crew opens the door to his office and there is what appears to be a huge bomb on his desk. Now, this thing was created by professional prop designers to look like what any person would think is a bomb -- about 24 big red sticks of dynamite, a huge timer, big yellow wires. So the poor cleaning crew runs out of the building screaming. The LAPD gets called and the bomb squad, evacuates a 4-block radius.

The studio got a bill for the trouble this caused.

[unrepuke]

14. Ah, extra exposure! Ain't Hollywood grand?

[MamaBear]

15. "They'd have had us years ago."

Precisely. I was rooting around in my pack for something on the subway last night after work, and took out a whole bunch of audio cable stuff I was carrying ... I'm not aware that anybody even noticed.

When the powers-that-be failed to identify and arrest the anthrax criminal, I got the message.

[kath]

13. You should notify the MTA and the press about this. And the dumbshit

MTA contractor should be SEVERELY reprimanded or lose his job. Doesn't the MTA do training about this kind of stuff?!?!?!?!
Sheesh.