Our 2009 Adventure

(Taget fra e-mail)
Like my subject line says, 2009 started with quite an adventure... although I'm not sure 'adventure' is the right word, as that indicates something pleasant, and that's not exactly what I'd call this!

Lars and I took the train home from Henni's place yesterday. We left at around 2am, so this was probably 20'ish minutes later. We had gotten off one train at a transit station and was waiting for the one that'd take us home. The train before ours was 10 minutes late, and when it arrived, we discovered why - some guy found it great fun to pull the emergency break at every station, and wouldn't let the doors close when it was time for the train to leave the station. Some of the other passengers had had enough of this, and attempted to throw him off the train at this station. He'd have none of it though, and dragged one of the others off with him, trying to start a fight. Stoned Guy (SG) was about my size, and Good Guy (GG) even bigger than Lars, so I don't really know what SG was thinking of, but he was OBVIOUSLY on something and therefore fearless. GG handled it so well, put up his hands to show he didn't want to fight, tried to calm down SG instead of using force on him, and generally impressed me by his actions. SG wouldn't leave him alone though, so finally he (GG) asked for somebody to call the police. Lars' and my train had arrived by now, but Lars didn't feel comfortable leaving, so we let it go. At this point another hot-head decided to join the fray and thought the way to subdue SG was to knock him out, so Lars rushed over to help GG keep the two apart. HotHead fortunately quickly decided he had better things to do and Lars and GG managed to get SG cornered (literally) and held him against the corner while Lars called one of his colleagues who was at work. At work they have a direct line to the police, so he knew they'd respond quicker that way, and true enough - two minutes later 7 policemen came running and took care of the situation.

SG claimed the police should arrest Lars and GG instead for "unlawful detention" and "picking fights" (hmmm... two very calm guys of around 6'7" and +200lb vs. one aggressive 5'7"/120lb, drugged up guy who was yelling insults at the police... wonder who they are going to believe).

Lars and GG was asked to give their statement and asked if they wanted to press charges. Naturally they didn't - they hadn't been harmed, but just wanted SG away from 'the public'. The police got their phone numbers, but didn't expect anything else to come of it, and walked away with SG - hopefully to let him get whatever drug he'd taken out of his system in the detention.

We'd missed 2 trains because of all this, so ended up coming home 40 minutes later than expected (making it 3:40am by this time - Lars had been up since 5:30am! I felt so sorry for him!), but I have to say, I was SO proud of Lars for jumping in to help like that. It's something I've always hoped I'd be ready to do if the situation called for it, but I know very well that I'm neither big enough nor strong enough, so might actually do more harm than good (which is frustrating when I want to help... especially when nobody else seems about to do anything), whereas Lars has the strength and 'leverage' needed.

There was never any danger, but I was still fairly shaken afterwards, and was glad we had the ride home to talk the experience through and get it sorted out before heading off to bed.

So there you have it - my first "exciting" experience of 2009... happening just 2.5 hours into the new year.