Man’s Arm Gets Stuck In Train Toilet

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 area 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 whether passengers would be compensated.

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

In
2003a 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 forumsdedicated to cell phones disappearing down the bowl, and according to
Cellular News, by 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 whether you manage to actually fish it out of the toilet, there are a few tricks worth trying to save a water-logged cell. Experts propose burying it in a bowl of raw 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 deathby a subway train when she climbed down off the platform to retrieve the cell phone she had dropped on the tracks.

Photo by Flickr user
kalleboo

Original post by Dave Demerjian

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