THE METRO NEWSPAPER in London is the free newspaper that is read by about three million people every day.
Its ‘Rush Hour Crush’ section is the famous missed connections page that allows readers to send in their lost loves spotted on public transport the previous day.
One Irish man living in London has been excellently pranking the section with his own fake Rush Hour Crushes for months now, and they are gas:
His name is Seamas O’Reilly and is a Derry writer and musician currently living in London.
He also targets the ‘Good Deed Feed’ in the same paper – where people send in good deeds they see happening around London – with similarly hilarious results:
Speaking to DailyEdge.ie, Seamas says how he came up with the idea:
I was obsessed with rush hour crushes when I moved to London and was determined to write some in.
It’s also a very satisfying way of writing short fiction that can be read by 3 million people the next day.
They are consistently excellent, and he documents his successfully published attempts on his website
The stories are just about believable
But mostly, they are straight-up hilarious
But such a prank has its unique challenges:
First one I submitted was trying to prove to myself that I could write one that was *both* funny and just about believable enough to get published.
Achieving one of those two criteria is fairly easy, both is pretty hard.
Today might have been his greatest triumph though
As he says on Twitter, Seamas managed to get both a Rush Hour Crush and a Good Deed published describing the exact same event from two different perspectives:
And here, the good deed featuring the same incident:
Seamas also documents all the attempts that never got published by the paper - and they’re certainly worth a read as well.
Glorious pranking.
