The day an escalator ate my pants

 The Funny Side

By Nury Vittachi

My wife says that instead of answering her questions, I always go and ask the readers of my column. I don’t know, do I? While you ponder that, let me share a shocking news report: a rogue escalator grabbed a man’s track suit bottom and stripped it off him. He had to wait at the bottom in his underpants while engineers tried to make the ughty moving staircase return his trousers.

“This happened a few days ago in Boston, but it nearly happened to me last year,” said a reader med Ali. One tried to take my chinos, once.

A quick survey of other readers produced links to numerous cases. A woman’s ankle-length dress was grabbed by an escalator in a Singapore mall. “I was sure that I was going to end up standing there, half-ked in my underwear,” she said. “And it wasn’t even my good underwear.”

It seems everyone has an escalator tale. In Japan, there’s an escalator in the Okadaya Mores shopping mall, Kawasaki, which takes you on a downward journey of just 83 cm, which is about 2.5 ft. For those of us who like to have a quick p on escalators, it’s a bit rushed. I’ve barely closed my eyes and it’s flinging me off the bottom.

In the US, the older escalators are just 16 inches wide. Unfortutely US residents are now more than 16 inches wide. An escalator for just one thigh at a time is not a lot of use.

In Hong Kong, a huge dispute is taking place. The city is frenetic but crowded, so busy people march up the left side of escalators while slowpokes stand on the right.

But ambitious officials at the main transport network MTR Corp realized that they could get margilly higher scores on safety charts if they made everyone stand still. (IANS)