Metro bag lady

Yes, I am obsessed with metro stories, seeing as I spend so much time on them and no, this particular bag lady is not what you might expect.
Our metro station, Bibliotheque François Mitterand, marks the start (or end) of line 14. Thus, very often, when you get to the platform there is a train waiting for it’s scheduled departure. Line 14 has no driver; everything is run by the little japanese finger inside a great computer somewhere out of sight. Line 14 also has two sets of doors that have to be conquered before you can get onto a train - one continuous glass wall on the platform, and then obviously the door on the train itself.

So, anyhow, it was one of those days when I sat in an unmoving train for about 2 mins, waiting for takeoff...people were strolling on to the train and sitting down and then, just as the closing door signal rang out urgently, two women came dashing towards us. The one in front was pulling a small suitcase behind her and it was this silly suitcase that obstructed the second woman from jumping on before the automatic doors shut with a violent shudder. The suitcase lady got her coat and one edge of the suitcase and her handbag stuck and it took two people inside the train to pull her and her paraphernalia in. Just as the platform doors closed, a second after the train doors, but before the train had pulled off, the second lady on the platform knocked hard on the glass and we all turned to look. “That’s my bag!” she gesticulated. The handbag that had been pulled on board with the first lady’s luggage, actually belonged to the second lady.

How that had happened, I don’t know. What was she doing tossing her handbag through the double sets of doors as they were closing?? The bag had been crushed by a door, jerked free by two people and was now on it’s way to St Lazare without its owner. What was even stranger, in my humble opinion, is that it wasn’t the silly suitcase lady who had caused a blockage in the first place who took responsibility for getting the bag back to its careless owner, but some totally innocent girl opposite me, who had been sitting on the train from way before take off! She gestured back at the bag lady, that she would get off at the next stop and wait for her. Then she looked at her watch and pulled an understandably annoyed face. The silly suitcase lady just shrugged at us on-lookers.

For some reason I was really cross with her - the silly suitcase lady that is. I thought it was out of line for her to have thrown herself onto the train and cause such a fuss (it’s always very dramatic when the doors slam onto people and other people have to wrench them free) and then not even have the decency to avoid further inconveniencing another passenger by taking the handbag that magnetically came on board with her, off at the next stop! I felt really bad for the girl that had been dragged into it and was now being made late by other people’s idiocy! But I didn’t have the guts to speak up and tell them what I was so pissed about... so I just shook my head and held it in... ahhhhh - the metro.