This. Unfortunately, some people who have them use only that camera instead of also looking over their shoulders to see if something is about to cross that area. But I would prefer not to give up this safety feature.
Good description. I’ve never flown on one but I have toured them a couple of times because I had a friend who did P.R. for airlines. The tours were always fun, but the crew sleeping bunks gave me claustrophobia.
I once had to evacuate a roller coaster car, but I did not see that on the list.
mmm
In Montreal, I had to evacuate a subway train and then the subway station itself due to a separatist bomb threat that came in for the train I was sitting on. I’ve also had to evacuate buildings for actual fires (twice for the kitchen, one on the assembly floor which was directly above the office I was) and twice for suspected gas leaks in buildings that housed laboratories for chemical research.
Me, too! Mine was at the top of Splash Mountain at Disneyland. Got to walk down all the steps to the bottom of the mountain, singing “Hi Ho, Hi Ho” off-key until the Security dude bribed us with line-jumper passes to just shut us up.
Well, that and us getting stuck.
I remember hearing of an incident where It’s a Small World stopped, but because people were in boats it was difficult for them to walk out. So, they were stuck in the ride – with the song going on and on and on – for hours.
Lawsuit city! 
I once was one of several people who had to rapidly evacuate a car because we realized that the battery, which in that car was under the back seat, was catching the seat on fire.
When we got out, thereby taking our weight off the seat, the battery stopped shorting across the springs and the fire went out. IIRC, which I might not, we were most of the way home and everybody who’d been in the back seat walked the rest of the way. I am sure that we didn’t all get back in.
I put that one under “other”.
I also once had to evacuate a house due to a fire. It was an old farmhouse; the realtor was showing me the house, and the tenants lit a fire while we were there – turned out it hadn’t occured to them to check the chimney first, and there was a doozy of a chimney fire. The realtor drove off to get the fire department (this was in the 1980’s, no cell phones) and left me standing on the lawn. She came back for me eventually, of course.
The house wasn’t much damaged, and that wasn’t why I didn’t buy the place. I don’t know whether the realtor believed that, though. She may for all I know still be telling the story of the house that caught fire while she was showing it.
ETA: not only do I not know whether I was ever on a 747, I don’t know whether, if I was, whether I was on the top level. I’m inclined to doubt it; and I don’t think I’ve ever flown first class; but my first memories of flying are pretty blurry, and they might be blurry enough even to have forgotten a double-decker plane because I wouldn’t have known whether that was odd or not.
A Volkswagen, right? As I understand it this was not an uncommon problem with the old rear engined VWs. They put the battery under the back seat, and if you put too much weight on the back seat the springs would short out the battery and ignite the seat. A pretty serious design flaw if you ask me.
For the emergency situation, I was in Tel Aviv for a family event just after Ben Gurion re-opened during the 2014 Gaza War (my paternal aunt’s family all moved to Israel in the 70s) - it was a weird trip as everywhere we went that had a large amount of tourist traffic was 95+% empty, so strangely easy to go places and do things.
While we were in a hotel in Tel Aviv there were two times we had to evacuate to ‘secure’ portions of building (designated areas, or reinforced stairwells) due to incoming missiles which were stopped apparently via Iron Dome defense.
It was quite the trip.
On to less stressful things, on the potato choice, I picked oven, but most of the time I go with air-fryer and smaller potatoes. Crispy, salty skin is delicious after eating the warm fluffy guts, without the mealy feeling I get from half microwaved/half baked potatoes which is the other ‘speedy’ option.
It was a Volkswagen, indeed. And I had a whole post typed out about how I didn’t think it was a Bug and didn’t think it could have been because nearly everyone routinely piled all sorts of stuff into Bugs – it was amazing how much and how many people (no seat belt or one-passenger-per-seat laws yet) you could get into one of those things – but when I gave up googling for alternative under-seat-battery Volkswagens and tried checking for where the battery was in an old Bug yes indeed it was under the rear seat. So probably it was a Beetle, after all.
And it sure is a design flaw. But apparently they went back to doing it later for the Touareg (another thing I just learned.)
My guess would be an Audi Fox, or possibly an Isetta.
I didn’t know that’s where the battery placement was in those, but how many people could you possibly pile into an Isetta?
- Two adults
- Four hobbits
- Twelve clowns
Supposedly, 5 could fit into an Isetta 600. Battery was under the passenger seat. A friend discovered that the hard way, when parading the car with her fiance. She was in the hot seat.
I was evacuated from a bus in Israel for a bomb threat.
If I give up having half a brain, would that mean that I’d have:
-
no brain at all
-
the half of my brain that I hadn’t given up
-
an entire brain, since I’d quit having only half of one?
I could not vote in the fire alarm poll.
I have pulled a fire alarm, but it was not a prank or an emergency - it was by request of a fire department official to initiate a drill.
mmm
It could have been a VW Fastback or Squareback, both which had the same chassis as a Beetle, but a bigger trunk and passenger cabin, and still had the battery under the back seat. My friend, driving a VW Beetle, called me, driving a VW Fastback, to get a jump. That was fun getting my car close enough to for the cables to reach.
We’re filth! We come from filth, we’re going to filth!
