They don’t give out full information, but I just happened to ride the escalator with the responding emergency personnel, so I knew it was one septuagenarian who took our BART train out of service.

“It’s her hip,” the station agent explained to the fireman who rode two steps above me. “She twisted it or something.”

“Where is she?”

“Still on the train. They’re holding at the platform.”

After I passed through the station gate I heard the fireman on his communication device behind me. He was using the verb broken about the passenger’s hip, though he hadn’t seen her yet.

I entered the middle of a standing nine-car train, and passed through most of it toward the back. Passengers appeared resigned or exasperated – clearly they’d been holding for awhile.

Shortly after I took a seat, the driver announced that the train was going out of service. He didn’t say why. He told us a San Francisco train would arrive on the opposite platform. He repeated the message until we’d all exited and filled the space between the tracks.

In the five minutes we waited I heard folks around me conjecturing and then concluding that the train had mechanical problems. “Not so,” I thought, but I kept it to myself. “It was the power of one woman’s twisted hip.”

As reality would have it, the incident had its effects on some. Of the 800 passengers riding that train that day, that hip twisted the lives of three.

One guy was late for a job interview. He was 23 years old, his name was Felix, and the call he made to report his situation and excuse his tardiness made him stand out enough that he got a design job he would otherwise have missed.

A 38 year-old Certified Financial Planner had a life-changing moment as a result of the train delay. If she’d been on time Gail would have made it to her office long before the transformer blew. It was another PG&E maintenance oversight, and the rocketing manhole cover missed her by a matter of inches. To say it shook her is an understatement. She quit her job that day, and went into partnership with her best friend Annie to open their restaurant.

And one pair of true lovers failed to meet. If the train hadn’t been interrupted, Gary would have stepped off the Embarcadero escalator just in time to collide with Laura. Each would have stuttered an apology while continuing to dance together in that way that lets neither proceed. They would have laughed self-consciously and Gary would have managed then to stammer out an invitation to coffee, and one thing would have led delightfully to another.

Too bad. They wouldn’t have had their fifth date at Gail’s restaurant, designed by Felix, but this would have been a better story.