MrBallen traces a fatal taxi ride to missed communication

His phone-warning episode connects a passenger's panic with two other stories of ordinary decisions ending in disaster.

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MrBallen Story of November 7, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? 986,879 views so far, and here is what is inside it.

Why you should always put your phone away

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0:46"The Runaway Chicken" begins with an escaped chicken falling into a village well in Egypt.
9:44MrBallen attributes the rescuers' deaths to a lack of oxygen and gases accumulating inside the well.
12:16"Final Assignment" follows a student who fears her taxi driver is kidnapping her.
20:00The explanation: the driver was partially deaf, misunderstood her destination and could not hear her protests.
22:04"Afternoon Nap" introduces a lumberjack working in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp.
27:35MrBallen recounts the newspaper story's explanation that a snake blocked the sleeping lumberjack's airway.

The driver couldn't hear her. In MrBallen's account, a student interprets a taxi's unexpected route as a kidnapping, while the driver continues unaware of her alarm.

That communication failure is the center of "Why you should always put your phone away," a three-story episode whose title points most directly to its middle chapter, "Final Assignment."

MrBallen recounts how a college student in Pohang, South Korea, reads coursework information on her phone as the journey begins. She misses the driver's cues, then becomes frightened when he takes an expressway. She texts her boyfriend and eventually jumps from the moving taxi, suffering fatal injuries. The explanation comes afterward: the driver was partially deaf, relied on lip-reading and had misunderstood her destination.

The opening story, "The Runaway Chicken," concerns an Egyptian well rescue in which people descend one after another without returning. MrBallen attributes the deaths to an oxygen-starved atmosphere and accumulated gases. The final chapter, "Afternoon Nap," recounts an old newspaper story about a sleeping lumberjack in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp and a fatal encounter with a snake.

These are narrated reconstructions, not eyewitness reports. The description says the stories are based on actual events, with some pseudonyms and details fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The episode also contains a sponsored segment.

The phone warning is therefore only part of the subject: the well story turns on would-be rescuers following each other into danger, while the taxi chapter hinges on two people failing to understand what the other knows.

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