We’ve been seeing the “if you see something, say something” campaign on the NYC subway for years and years now.  Up until Monday, we never once said something because we never really saw something that needed to be spoken of.

It happened as we stepped off of an uptown R train at Rector Street in the early afternoon.  As we exited the first car, we noticed a woman on the platform walking towards us with a yellow plastic bag that appeared to have a bunch of glass jars in it.  As everyone else on the platform stepped onto the train, this lady went out of her way to place the bag of jars on the platform before she then ran onto the train.

Now this might seem like a simple case of a strange person deciding to leave garbage on a subway platform, but it was also offbeat in that she went out of her way to do so.  Why would she have brought a bag of glass bottles down to the subway and through the turnstile if it was garbage?  Wouldn’t one logically have left them just about anywhere else?  Like a garbage can at home?  A garbage can in the street?  Or simply on a curb?  And why would she risk almost missing the train to place the bag neatly on the platform with only a few seconds time before the train doors close?

So there it was, a yellow plastic bag with what looked to be glass in it on the subway platform.  If the bag was an IED, the glass would act to create shrapnel once the device explodes.

As we exited the turnstile, we went up to the token booth clerk and informed him of how there was a suspicious package on the platform due to a lady having gone out of her way to leave the bag full of glass on the platform before running onto the train.  He asked what the bag looked like, and then looked at us as if we were a crazy person who had escaped from Bellevue for having brought this to his attention.

Based off of our gut feeling about the conversation with that token booth clerk, he didn’t do a thing with, or about that suspicious yellow bag.  He likely went about his day as if we were merely another person who purchased a MetroCard.  And since we haven’t heard anything in the news about an IED being found or exploding at Rector Street, the bag was merely the garbage of a weird lady who brought a full bag of glass to the subway platform to dispose of it by way of the floor of a platform.

So the point of the matter is, the “if you see something, say something” campaign should have a tagline to it that says, “so that the person who you are informing can do absolutely nothing with the potentially lifesaving information that you are providing them.”