Tragedy struck the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus on Sunday as a student seemed to walk aimlessly into 14th Street. Sarah Johnson, a sophomore at UNL, had merely been strolling to her next class, with her eyes intently focused on the screen of her mobile device, before the accident occurred.
“There must have been something completely awesome on her phone,” said Justin Huffman, who reportedly saw Johnson before the accident. “I was running like a champ to my next psychology lecture that was in four minutes, then I turn a corner and almost plow right into this chick that’s hogging up the middle of the sidewalk and that’s walking as fast as a handicapped glacier. I swear, a cinderblock could outrun her.”
Huffman said as he reluctantly followed Johnson at the speed of growing grass, the two approached a four-stop intersection. As Huffman stopped, he said, Johnson ‘just…kept going.’
“Slowly, of course,” Huffman explain. “The disturbing part is just how she seemed to inch her way into the traffic and never took her eyes of the phone screen. Like, she dared the cars to keep on driving. Well…they did.”
When asked what was so captivating on her phone that caused her to crawl into the stream of five-ton hunks of metal going at dangerous speeds, Johnson answered that she had been Tweeting about how people should care about the ache in her left toe while simultaneously texting her boyfriend, Chad McDaniel, while simultaneously switching her playlists on iTunes to something louder.
“I mean, what else am I going to fucking do for four blocks between classes?” asked Johnson, eyes unblinkingly staring at her new phone. “Look at trees? Right. I can do that at home.”
Upon further investigation, Johnson, originally from a city in the Mojave Desert in Arizona, has had a long history of bumping into park benches and mind-numbingly “taking her time” to get to class.
However, Johnson appears to be just another typical UNL student, according to Huffman.
“Yeah, at first I was thinking about prying my fingernails off with a pair of scissors because of how slow I was going, but then I just looked behind me,” explained Huffman. “Everyone else had phones out too. When we stopped at the intersection, I just stretched my arms out and a bunch of people bumped into them. A really short girl was even clotheslined by my forearm. That was fucking hilarious.”
With a closing comment, Huffman emphasized just how baffled he was at the incident.
“Sure, she was fearless in the face of death. Like Jesus. Or something. But, even if she was fearless, she couldn’t even walk into the street to her doom as a normal human being could.”