Man's Arm Gets Stuck In Train Toilet

[i4God]

Talk about the train ride from hell.

Last night a French man found his arm stuck inside a train toilet after he went fishing around for the cell phone he had dropped in the bowl. The train, one of France's sexy high speed TGVs, has toilets with high suction flushing systems, and the passenger's arm was caught all the way to the shoulder. The train had to stop for two hours while emergency workers hacked through plumbing to remove the toilet, and the passenger was removed on a stretcher, with the toilet still attached to his arm.

"He was cut free from the toilet on the platform, and apart from suffering bruising and smelling a bit, he suffered no other injuries," a spokesman for the fire department told The Telegraph. A rep from SNCF, the company that operates the TGV, added that the train was two hours late into Paris, but didn't say if passengers would be compensated.

While the incident is both hysterical and sort of pathetic, it happens more often than you might think.

In 2003 a man riding a Metro-North commuter train out of New York got his arm jammed into a toilet while trying to retrieve his cell, pissing off thousands of New Yorkers who found their evening commutes delayed by several hours. The same thing happened a few years back to a woman traveling on a Northeast Corridor Amtrak train.

As a matter of fact, there are entire forums dedicated to cell phones disappearing down the bowl, and according to Cellular News, over 850,000 cell phones are dropped into the toilet each year in the UK alone (compared with 540,000 left in taxis and busses).

While in most cases your mobile will be toast if you manage to actually fish it out of the toilet, there are a few tricks worth trying to save a water-logged cell. Experts suggest burying it in a bowl of uncooked rice to soak up the moisture, gently blowing on it with a hair dryer, or baking it in a conventional or convection oven at low temperatures. Do not under any circumstances microwave the phone.

The arm in the toilet stuff may be kind of funny, but there are more tragic examples of trains and cell phones not mixing. In 2004, a woman from Queens was crushed to death by a subway train when she climbed down off the platform to retrieve the cell phone she had dropped on the tracks.

I found it here: http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/10/mans-arm-gets-s.html

[eagle]

:shock:

[iain-uk]

I have seen lots of things on my trains - from catching couples at it to poledancing etc., but I have never had anyone sticking their arms down the toilets...

[Stramash]

I have seen lots of things on my trains - from catching couples at it to poledancing etc., but I have never had anyone sticking their arms down the toilets...

poledancing ON A TRAIN????

explain...