The man was travelling with his daughter on the Intercity train which departed from Stockholm shortly after noon Monday. At 2:30 p.m. the train stopped at Hallsberg. The man used the opportunity to take a smoke on the platform, however, before he had finished his cigarette the train pulled out.
“He did the unwise thing to jump on and was hanging on the last car,” said Magnus Andersson, media contact at Svenska Jernvägar. “He managed to hang on for 15 to 20 minutes. When the train personnel discovered this, they pulled the emergency brake and got him inside.”
According to the paper, it was the man’s 9-year-old daughter who made the train personnel aware of the situation when she asked for her father. The girl talked to the conductor, explained Stina Abrahamsson, age 23. “She asked for her daddy, but the conductor said that if anyone was stupid enough to step of the train, had himself to blame.”
However, the man hanging on for his dear life happened to have his cell phone and he managed to contact the train personnel.
…another good reason to have a cell phone!
SOLEDAD, CA—A pen-wide smoking ban instituted last week devastated the Salinas Valley State Prison’s fragile economy, inmate #67545 said Monday. “There were occasional fluctuations or recalibrations, but a bar of soap used to equal three cigarettes; a Snickers, four; a Percocet, 15,” said Kenneth Oglivy, a former WorldCom accountant serving 10 years for embezzlement.
“After the ban, the value of a carton of Newports climbed to 50 times its 2003 value. Now that those cigarettes are gone, it’s total chaos.” Oglivy said Salinas Valley inmates will have to devise a new system of value based on some other commodity, such as assholes.