livedarklions

I'm not terribly surprised--people in that place seem to like a fight.

Never ridden there, but I did break up an argument between a ticket person and a customer in the Montreal Metro in the late 1980s. My then-wife and I were in line to get tickets to ride the train and in those days, you had to buy them from a human being in a glass booth. The woman ahead of us had begrudgingly paid for a ticket when she was asserting she had already paid once. For some reason, the system then was that the seller gave you a paper ticket you had to put into a fare box and then the ticket taker would unlock the turnstile. For reasons I couldn't quite get, the woman in line was refusing to put the ticket in the fare box, leaving it under the window of the booth, and the ticket taker was refusing to unlock the turnstile until she put the ticket in the fare box. I listened to this fascinating Francophone vs. Anglophone debate for about a minute during which we could not buy tickets to enter, all the meantime listening to trains down in the tunnel departing without us. Finally, I just reached around the woman, picked up the ticket, and dumped it in the fare box, then announced two tickets please. They both looked at me in shock, and then I swear they both looked deflated because I took away their argument. Neither of them said a word to me, but we finally got through the turnstile.