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A little of that good old-fashioned NYC teamwork. I think maybe the worst place one could possibly drop their AirPod case is the top of the escalator at 34th Street – Hudson Yards. (For anyone unfamiliar: a chthonic, interminable beast of an escalator. Maybe the longest in the city?)

The guy in front of me (or so I thought) drops his AirPods right at escalator’s crest. But he’s been kinda thrust off past the spot via his upward momentum. So I sweep down and grab what I realize is just the AirPod case. AirPods have this weird internal potential energy -I noticed this myself on one of the many trillion times I’ve dropped mine- and so when you drop them just right, the pods themselves spring unpredictably forth like pieces of glass when you smash a beer bottle. Anyway I hand the AirPod case to the guy in front of me, but it isn’t his. Belongs to the guy in front of him. And the girl next to us has located the sprung pods themselves.

“Here you go,” she says, to a guy who seems flummoxed being handed multiple things simultaneously by multiple strangers.

“Thanks…..everyone,” he says. With a sweet-looking look on his face; half grateful and half bashful.

It’s NYC though. So we’re not gonna stick around and make a big fucking deal about it. Job done, we burst forth to our separate vectors not so unlike AirPods loosed from their AirPod case.