This video prompts two immediate suppositions. The first is that five dollars isn’t enough money for most people to risk their lives (although if it’s late at night and the G train clearly won’t be here for another 20 minutes, maybe it is) and second, if you shout “I’ll give you a hundred dollars” to strangers in a YouTube video documenting street life, people on reddit are going to call you an asshole.

In this video uploaded to YouTube yesterday shot at the Metropolitan Avenue station (which serves the G line, the only line in all of NYC that never enters Manhattan), this one guy concocted an ill-advised plan to get his friend on the other platform a five-dollar bill, which plan consisted of balling up the bill and hurling it across two sets of tracks (one in each direction). Predictably, this didn’t work—the bill didn’t even make it across one set of tracks completely. Immediately a busker on the other platform sprang into action, lowering himself down onto the tracks and walking gingerly over presumed mounds of rodenticide and as well as two “third rails.” As viewers of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (no, not the John Travolta version) are aware, all New York City subways are powered by a “third rail,” which carries 660 volts of electricity, more than enough for a lethal dose.

In any case, the first guy immediately bellows at the busker not to do that—indeed, he’ll give him a hundred bucks not to do that—but the busker ignores him. The busker quickly finds the money and then scampers back over to his musical instrument, to the cheers of everyone present. Surely feeling a little guilty about having inadvertently created the conditions for a grisly accidental death, the first guy continues to offer a hundred dollars to the busker.

It looks like the video was shot late at night (around midnight, perhaps), when the subway trains are appallingly infrequent (as all New Yorkers know), and the busker wouldn’t be at risk so much because of the potential for a collision. The real issue is the third rail, but if you’re careful and know where they are (they are the raised rails closer to the center, away from the platforms, they are covered by a protective canopy and are thus less shiny than regular rails), then it’s a matter of your own dexterity and care—clearly this busker was willing to give it a shot. It’s five dollars, after all.
 

 
via ANIMAL