A Gorey Thing Happened on the Way to East 44th

I got out of a painful number-crunching session in Finance Class and hurried out of my school building, with nothing else in mind but my warm bed and a glass of OJ. Since I have a monthly Metro pass, I took the crosstown bus – which saved me 10 minutes of walking in the bitter cold of a Spring evening. I was on the phone with a friend, yakking about anything unrelated to Math, then, suddenly a bunch of blinking NYPD police cars overtook my bus. There were at least 3 of them. Oblivious and still on the phone, my bus stopped on 42^nd and 3^rd, an intersection, and I looked out. Turns out that a man was run over by an uptown bus (the long kind with an accordion type separator in the middle?) and his body lain under it, between the large tires. Within a minute, 3 Midtown hospital ambulances were honking its way into the traffic. Then shortly after, two NYFD trucks came! Ready to ramble.

Let’s do the math: 3 police cars, 3 ambulances, 2 trucks. That’s 8 rescue teams, and one hurt victim. That’s pretty impressive. I guess that’s the benefit of living in a First-world country, there’s unlimited supply of resources for rescue and safety. I just wonder if the man who got run over was able to live. I didn’t find out, because I didn’t want to share in his pain (and the spectators’ remorse). So I just got off the bus, walked through the nosy crowd, went home, and did more number-crunching instead.