A tale of the Tube with a heartwarming ending

We dashed for the waiting train in a crowded London Tube station — no time to lose — but another passenger got in the way.

I had to stop in my tracks. Not my mobile, which, carried forward by the momentum, kept on going — stopping only on the tracks below.

I can still replay the scene in slow motion — feeling the weight of the cellphone hurtling out of my unzipped jacket pocket, hearing it clanging on the subway platform, watching it sliding like a puck toward the waiting train, then tumbling clunkily through the gap. Gone.

You know that mantra, repeated endlessly in London as in Toronto: “Mind the gap!”

Trust me when I tell you that on the Tube, unlike in Toronto, the gap is gargantuan — more like a yawning chasm several centimetres wide. As anyone who has ever been separated from their phone will understand, I felt momentarily untethered — daunted by the prospect of reconfiguring a new device connected to my cerebral cortex.

As the subway pulled out of the cavernous Leicester Square Station, we peered purposefully over the platform. Only to be greeted by the daily detritus of lost terrestrial objects — a posh water bottle hiding in the shadows, a battered phone case teasing us, but no trace of my mobile after it bounced under the lip of the platform into the bowels of the London Underground.

Pro tip: Don’t jump in after your phone.

As any journalist can tell you, to be disconnected is to be disoriented. But a lack of connectivity can help you reconnect with humanity.

Who ya gonna call? And how do you make that call without your phone?

Help is never far away on the Underground, where a friendly but firm voice keeps reminding you on the public address system, “We’ll sort it: See it. Say it. Sorted!”

Admittedly, that saying speaks more to phoning in terrorist perils than reporting lost phones. But how exactly do they sort it?

Torontonians will remember exTTC boss Andy Byford inculcating a similar service motif here at home: Every subway station should have a service manager, someone who is accessible to and accountable on-site.

Byford started his career in the London Underground, then flitted off to New York before returning to the Tube — now rebranded “Transport for London,” or TfL — to preside over the new Elizabeth Line as his crowning achievement. But for all that infrastructure he left behind, his lasting legacy may be the human element that he tried to transplant here and there.

Our London hosts — colleagues from my former foreign correspondent days (with whom we’ve braved graver dangers) — quickly surfed the TfL website. We learned that its staff are equipped with a “special tool called a track retrieval device (that) … allows us to retrieve your item without having to go down onto the track.”

Seeing light at the end of the Underground tunnel, we wandered through the labyrinth that is Leicester Square to the control room that serves as its nerve centre. After pleading my plight, I was joined by two jovial and voluble workers clad in fluorescent orange vests ready to deploy the “tool” — a wooden pole with a flat end.

Admittedly, the “retrieval device” wasn’t the robotic apparatus I’d imagined — I watched them apply low-tech, double-sided stickers to its bottom. But I was heartened by their big hearts.

Descending the endless escalators, they briefed me on the plan of attack to cheer me up. Back on the platform, the London crowds parted obediently as we scoured the tracks for my missing mobile.

Nothing. In truth, I’d assumed their “tool” would have bright lights and periscopes to see around corners.

No luck, but still British pluck. They took my email address and held out hope that engineers would clear the tracks overnight.

I woke up to an empty iPad inbox. Nothing from the Underground — and we’d be airborne within hours on the flight home to Toronto.

But when I checked my other email address, there it was: Signs of life!

“Did you lose any property? — Green Park — Item reference 66568152 has been found.”

How did they get my other email? I quickly realized they’d seen it on the lockscreen of my phone.

I went straight back to Leicester Square, but nothing. The helpful station manager discerned from my iPad that the notification had emanated from Green Park Station one stop over, where the crew had wound up its work.

Unprompted, he phoned ahead to ensure my phone was waiting for me on arrival — unscratched and unscathed.

I found myself reunited with this lost piece of personal technology. And I found my faith in human empathy reconfirmed.

People love to crab about crappy public services, personified by heartless counter clerks or officious officials. And yet, more often than not, public service can surprise, enthrall and thrill you.

Thanks for sorting it. And mind the gap!