Welcome Linus Behnke!

From one moment to the other he went completely pale.

Till and Annika were on their way to a business date in Hamburg. They had just boarded the ICE train in Berlin and had been travelling for barely 15 minutes. When Till’s phone rang.

It was Svenja speaking. She explained to her man that their baby decided to arrive early - now, to be precise.

Did he first scream, race up and down the aisle, and then get pale? Or the other way round? Even though Annika was there to witness this impressive scene it will forever stay one of those “you had to be there moments”.

Annika found the conductor in the train kitchen. “This train needs to be stopped.” “I’m afraid we can only do that in the case of a medical emergency”, said the conductor. “Well, I’m afraid we have a medical emergency”, she replied, “My colleague’s getting a baby.”

Within no time (what, to Till, must have seemed an eternity) they had the ICE train stop at some random provincial station of a town called Ludwigslust. Then, they had a second ICE train, this one going back to Berlin, stop there as well to pick Till up.

This act of extraordinary customer support is, to say the least, quite uncommon for the Deutsche Bahn. Germans (and other regular DB customers) know about their infamous reputation.

Anyway. The guy in charge of coordinating the departures and arrvials of the trains (a.k.a. the hero) told the conductor to tell Till all he wanted is a crate of beer for this favour. The future dad, in the meantime gone stoical and on auto pilot, asked Annika to write down this guy’s email address… noboby will ever know if Till envisioned the crate of beer as email attachment.

23 hours - and four midwives’ shifts - later Linus Behnke is born. In the morning of Thursday June 5th of 2008.

Welcome Linus! And congratulations to the proud parents! The betterplace Team is very happy for all of you.