Got off a red eye flight with my family and my kid said he was hungry, so we agree that I’ll get some breakfast stuff with my kid while my wife gets the baggage.
Leave awkwardly holding two coffees and bags of pastries. Everything is fine until we get to the escalator, and here’s where I fucked up.
I helped maneuver my kid’s suitcase onto the escalator and then because it looked like it might fall over, stepped onto the escalator after it. This would have been fine EXCEPT my kid doesn’t like to get on an escalator by himself. So while I began to descend the escalator with the bag, he stayed at the top calling after me, increasingly distressed.
I began running up the escalator the wrong way, still holding the two coffees and now the suitcase as well. I had almost gotten to the top when I slipped, spilling my wife’s hot coffee all over the escalator and jamming my knee into the razor-sharp edge of the escalator stairs. Fortunately a kind gentleman helped my kid onto the escalator as I scrambled around the moving, coffee-covered stairs. What became of the other coffee, you may ask? That one was accidentally spilled by my son on the floor where I was sitting a short time later, bandaging my bleeding knee, soaking my butt with coffee.
Long story short, I’m now lying in bed icing my fucked up knee. Fortunately I found some old percocets in the medicine box. The moral of the story is that America must be destroyed
I watched videos of deadly escalator incidents as a kid on the internet and I won’t go anywhere near them both then and now as I’ve done more research on them as an adult. That kid is right to be anxious about these in my opinion.
They typically don’t have any sort of automatic cutoff because the way they operate is a fixed speed at variable loads. So if a foreign object gets sucked into the machinery it will pass that foreign object through without a hiccup. The guards in place to prevent the intrusion of foreign objects are inadequate and the addition of a manual emergency cutoff is not adequate either.
The foam type of shoes, like crocs or those foam soled Nike’s for example, are very easy to get caught in the machinery when, for instance, you try and “polish” your shoes against the brushes on the side. Typically children wear those shoes, typically children don’t have the foresight to think that’s a bad idea, and the data shows that typically it’s children involved in fatal escalator incidents. It’s a bad design, ban escalators, turn them all into stairs.
These problems get worse when escalators are not properly maintained, and it’s expensive to maintain escalators properly. They will only get more unsafe with time as the metaphorical copper continues getting ripped out of the walls of our economy and maintenance budgets collapse.
I got a croc caught in the side of an escalator as a kid. Fortunately it just yanked the shoe off my foot, mangled it, and spit it out at the top.
I don’t like escalators anymore.
That was my worst nightmare, I’m glad all you lost was a shoe.
While this is true, the actual risk in terms of incidents per escalator journey taken are miniscule. The risk of being seriously injured in an escalator incident is similar to that of being struck by lightning, which is not, for most people, a daily concern.