Drama Drama Drama

Before I go into the brief story I am presenting to you today, allow me to add this little tidbit. I have no idea of what events led into what was happening when I walked down the stairs into the train station. Given that brief prologue, here goes. 

I left work as I usually do, walked down Bleecker Street and crossed Lafayette Street to catch the Uptown #6 train. I had yet to put on my headphones so I could hear that there was some kind of commotion on the platform. As I take a few steps down, I hear something hitting the floor and breaking. I hesitated briefly on the staircase before continuing down. As I reach the bottom of the stairs, a man is throwing what looks like the remnants of a portable CD player to the wall. Yes, I did say a portable CD player. You do remember what those devices looked like in the Pre-iPod/MP3 player days. Right? But I digress.

Now, as I stated at the beginning of this post, I don't know why this guy was so irate as to ruin his music player. Now I assume that it was his since none of his friends (who were keeping their distance from him) were complaining about the destroyed electronic device. I made brief eye contact with the pissed off dude and stepped over his CD as I kept on my way to the turnstile. All I could hear as I swiped my Metrocard was f-bomb this and I don't give a f-bomb about that. This dude was seriously irate. 

As I stood on the platform, I decided to look back to see what was going on. Nothing worse that having major issues go down behind you and not knowing about it. Chalk it up to my being nosy. Anyway, I see the pissed off individual yelling at the token booth clerk while being restrained by one of his buddies. Yes, I realize that the term "token booth" is referring to a relic of an earlier era when riders used token coins to gain entry to the subway. If you have another more socially relevant name for the enclosure, let me know. Until then, back to the story at hand. 

The man was yelling at the clerk and the clerk kept saying something to him over the microphone. I was unsure of what he said since it was garbled but I don't think they were sweet nothings, since the man went even more ballistic. Now he started kicking the bottom of the booth and threatening to wait for the clerk to finish his shift and kick his ass. As amusing as the spectacle was, it grew quite tired and I decided to proceed towards the middle of the platform, shaking my head the whole way down. Another interesting night in the NYC Subway system.

FH