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Would You Risk Death For Your iPhone?
By
John Del Signore
Published Jan 2, 2008
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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By
John Del Signore
Published Jan 2, 2008
Modified Mar 7, 2008
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Remember how a few years ago a 19-year-old girl climbed down onto the subway tracks to get her phone and got killed by an oncoming V train? It seems the lesson still hasn’t been learned and commuters are still risking their lives to retrieve dropped objects: Tourist Bijan Rezvani recently explained his reasons for venturing down there to collect his precious iPhone.
It's the first time I've had a cool phone that does anything and also the first time I've gone around taking photos of things in my life, so the stuff I had captured was kind of important for me to keep.
More important than keeping his life, apparently. Rezvani survived the mission, obviously, and his story joins a long line of phone rescue nightmares, like the legendary guy who, to retrieve his phone, stuck his arm so deep in a train toilet he got stuck. (It took the jaws of life to get him out and the phone was never found.) It makes us wonder where a phone has to be for someone to not try to get it back.
And when it comes to climbing down on onto subway tracks, keep in mind it’s not just the speeding train you have to worry about, but also the third rail, rat bites and risk of arrest. LAPTOP magazine, who interviewed Rezvani, compiled a list of gadgets they’d be willing to risk death to recover from the subway, like the Nintendo DS and the iPod Nano.
We’ve done some soul searching and are hard pressed to come up with any gadget so indispensable that we’d risk death for it. What about you – is there anything you’d tempt fate to get back from the subway tracks?
Tagged
advice
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News: NYC
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John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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