LaughAtlantis

I have a secret fear of escalators.
Of course, now I've revealed it, so it's not so secret, eh?

There are five escalators between the T and my work. Now, I could walk up all the flights of stairs associated with them but my right ankle and both my knees are somewhat shot right now (I'm in physical therapy; I fell off a bus; long story...) so I have resigned myself to taking at least a few of these escalators each day. So the fear holds me.

My problems with escalators are manifold. An escalator should simply be a flight of stairs that moves up, right? So why is there always a list of like ten things you shouldn't do posted at each end of the escalator? You don't have these sort of warnings for stairs! Hold onto the edge, hold onto your child, don't touch the side of the escalator with your feet, don't take strollers with you, be careful with your belongings, be careful getting on, be careful getting off... seriously, is it any wonder that these things scare the bejesus out of me?

The getting on part of the process is okay for the most part. But the getting off parts confound me. Getting on from the bottom, you just look for when a stair comes out and then you step on it. That's okay. But getting off at the top, you can do one of two things. You can either wait until you get to the tippety top, when your fieet are practically touching the drop-off, and then step. This is scary because if you happen to miss the drop-off, you can trip or stumble getting off and you look like an ass. Alternatively you can wait till you are about a half step up from the top and push off from there. Then you run the risk of tripping or getting stuck and slipping backwards. That's frightening. Getting on at the top - again, look for the stair to form and then step on. But at the bottom, what do you do?? You have to gauge just the right place to step off from, which is sometimes a challenge. Again, very easy to trip.

And then you have the riding options. Do you stand and wait for the escalator to actually raise or lower you, or do you walk along with it? I'm sort of okay with walking up it, but the walking down part... holy crap, that's scary. If you fell, you would tumble forward onto a mass of metal that would continue down until your head was hitting a point where the metal was just being sucked into the floor while more pseudo-stairs were smacking you in the head. Not to mention, you could possibly take people out who were in front of you. Bang into someone else and create a four-person escalator pile-up. And the people behind you would have to jump over the pigpile in order to get off where they could hopefully whip out their cell phones and dial 911.

To top it all off, being on an escalator puts you at the mercy of the other people on it as well. If you stand, there may be people behind you who want to run up it and get pissy because you have no intention of doing so. There comes the inevitable sighing in those cases. But my favorite people to deal with are the ones who get off the escalator and stand there looking around to see where they are. I just want to yell at them,"You've just gotten off a damned escalator, you mental midgets! Anyone behind you is going to smack right into you! MOVE!!!" But that would probably be rude, eh?

Escalators. The most frightening things in the world - with the exception, perhaps, of giant man-eating sabre-tooth tigers back from the dead and sitting at my front door. But other than that... escalators.