IM-PACT!!

If the topic of this post eludes you a bit and there is no way you are able to decipher the connection between getting a seat in the metro and lateral thinking, hold on for a few moments till you read it till the end.. :-)

We all have experienced that not getting a seat in the metro specifically if you are a long distance traveller can be bit frustrating.. Even for those who dont mind standing in the metro would also agree that sitting is better than standing, even though marginally. And since i have to travel almost everyday from home to college in a metro its important for me to sit, specially in exam days so that i can revise (or rather study for the first time) on the seat :-). I am not one of those people who would run like crazy to grab a seat the moment the metro door opens, and neither will i throw my hankerchief/hanky from far on a seat to claim it. (Btw i have started carrying hankies.. courtesy Reedima).

So finally after thinking i carved out an intelligent way to get a seat in the metro most of the times. Here luck favours me a bit because my station is the second station so the metro may still have some vacant seats. But ofcourse my job is to ensure that i am one of those lucky few who gets one of those very few vacant seats in a huge metro. So what did i do??

Well a little bit of observation came handy. Here goes the explanation. I am sure all of us have seen that there is always one escalator and one stair case which leads us to the platform. Most of the times these escalators and staircase connect to the two extreme ends of the platform. Now the main point is that most people use the escalators to reach the platform for obvious reasons, so obviously that end of the platform which is connected by the escalator is always more crouded with people, and since very few people use the stair case, the end of the platform which is connected with the staircase is relatively empty.

Moreover as the law of central tendency and normal distribution states that everything in the universe tends to locate in a normally distributed way, so many people from both ends walk towards the center of the platform to board the train.

Here goes the trick. I always take care of both these things and so i take the staircase to reach that end of the platform which is scantily populated and i dont walk towards the center, and trust me most of the times i successfully get a seat, as correspondingly the probability of finding a vacant seat in that end of the train which corresponds to the end of the platform which is connected with the staircase is immensely high. (Ofcourse the precondition is that this can be only done in first few stations that is when metro still has some seats vacant)

Now you probably know what has Lateral thinking got to do with finding a seat in the metro..

Intelligent guy... eh!!!!!!

Hope you too start finding a seat in the metro more often :-)