998 TIMES

Not long ago it became known that a high school student collapsed on the so-called Floridsdorf bridge after walking back and forth across the Floridsdorf bridge about a thousand times. He stated that on the way to school he had been seized by, as he put it, a terrible fear of school, which would not let him leave the bridge once he had set foot on it and compelled him to walk back and forth across it almost a thousand times. To take his mind off his fear, he said, he had counted the number of steps he took as he went back and forth across the Floridsdorf bridge, but he had finally given up this distraction because it was too much for him. He had, however, at least been able to count and take note of how often he had gone one way and how often the other across the Floridsdorf bridge. Exactly nine hundred ninety-eight times. His parents fetched the exhausted sixteen-year-old from a police station in the so-called Floridsdorfer Spitz, where police officers had taken him. What more will happen to him cannot be said.