I had an amusing experience this morning that enlightened me as to a rather humorous way to wreak a little havoc in a train station during rush hour. As I entered the station, I noticed some commotion as I approached the escalator leading up to the platform. As I came nearer, a woman coming down the adjacent stairway brushed past me and I felt something tug at my jacket. I turned and looked at the woman, who, in turn, turned around to look at me with a mix of confusion and anger, and it became clear that we were both somehow entwined with some sort of thread (which I had immediately assumed had come from her coat). She tried to pull away with even stronger force, at which point I realized that I wasn’t actually bound to her, but rather she was bound to something else further away and I had merely walked in between.

Stepping over the thread, I made my way up the escalator, passing at least a dozen other people franticly trying to untangle themselves at the base of it and another half a dozen doing the same at the top. And there, rolling about on the top step of the escalator, was the culprit: a spool of plain blue sewing thread. This innocent little item had, likely by accident, forced a large number of people who otherwise pass by one another every day without so much as acknowledging each other’s existence to suddenly find themselves entangled together, all fighting to break free in a frenzied moment of panic and confusion. The looks on their faces were priceless (as likely was the one on mine).

So there you have it: one spool of high quality thread + loads of people moving about quickly in a confined space = a nice recipe for introducing some subtle chaos to the daily commute. Of course, I certainly don’t advocate anyone carrying out this prank themselves (especially not in the U.S. — you’d probably be charged with terrorism, if caught), but it was a humorous diversion from the dull morning routine, nonetheless.