You know that voice you hear in the subway announcing the next station? Imagine if it suddenly started to insult you. That's just one of the surprising revelations about the woman who calls out the pre-recorded "mind the gap" warning on
London, England's famous tube system.
But now Emma Clarke, who has provided that safety warning for years, has been fired by her employers after what she calls a giant misunderstanding. The 36-year-old was quoted as saying she wouldn't ride the subway because she found it "dreadful." But she insists what she really said was that hearing her own voice and watching people react to it onboard a train would be "dreadful."
Those who run the system weren't amused and fired her for the supposed comments.
But that's not all she did that may have led to her own demise. Clarke is a voiceover artist and decided to use her most famous work as the basis for an online audition. So she re-recorded a number of new warnings that were filled with insults to passengers. Among them:
- "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly."
- "Would the passenger in the red shirt pretending to read the paper but who is actually staring at that woman's chest please stop. You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert."
- "Would passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus please accept that they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers."
- "Here we are crammed again into a sweaty Tube carriage ... If you're female smile at the bloke next to you and make his day. He's probably not had sex for months."
She's posted her work on the web, but there's been so much publicity - and so much traffic - it's crashed the site.
You can try and see if it's back up here.
Transport for London claims the announcements weren't to blame for her sudden departure, but Clarke believes the entire incident is just one large error. But when it comes to a perceived lack of judgment, it appears her employers really did mind the gap.