My first amusing Metro story

I was riding the Metro (subway) one morning last week. It was a rather crowded train, and I was standing near the doors and holding onto the rail along with about a dozen other commuters. I needed to make one transfer from the Red Line to the Orange Line.

We had reached one of the stations before my transfer point when there was a sudden growing commotion in the next standing area (roughly eight rows of seats between the standing areas) and we could all sense the rising panic among the commuters in that area, and like a wave at a football game, this panic seemed to swell through the rows of seats toward our standing area.

"What's going on?!?!", "Huh?!?" and other exclamations were heard. And our standing area people started panicking. I thought someone must've pulled out a gun! The doors opened, and we all pushed to bolt out of the train. I heard a woman yell, "Calm down, calm down!" I was struggling to get out too, and I think the woman thought we'd create a stampede.

Many commuters started exiting, saying, "I'm just going to walk from here." Everyone seemed bewildered and alarmed. But it looked like nothing had really happened. We were all scratching our heads and wondering what had caused the panic. It looked safe enough... no crazy gun-wielders in sight. I decided to just re-board the train.

There seemed to be a collective release of stress and sigh of relief, but everyone still seemed rather shaken up. It's kind of an intense city, and it seems like even nearly 2 yrs after the 9/11 attack, people are still wound up pretty tight. Even a foreigner like me, the mob mentality and fleeing survival urge is very strong and when it comes down to it, I'm pretty fearful for my own life.

A guy near me started chuckling and shaking his head. I asked him, "What happened?"

He said, "Somewhere, there's a mouse that's laughing at our expense."