Downtown Toronto lawyer emerges after 9 years lost in underground network of food courts

Exhausted, disoriented, deficient in vitamin D and clearly not thriving on a diet of 100% Manchu Wok, prominent Toronto lawyer Michael Morrow has finally found an exit sign that led to street level nine years after he got up from his desk to go "quickly grab lunch" in a nearby food court.

His last words were "Back in five, guys," recalls colleague Miriam Sandbart, a fellow lawyer at Callaghan Smiley & Doom.

"But then an hour rolled by. And then he missed a 4 pm client briefing. And then Obama got re-elected, "Gangnam Style" exploded, Rob Ford smoked crack, manbuns became popular, Trump became president, Nazis returned, and we just kind of figured, well, maybe he's taken his lunch to the park or something."

Judge Ruby J. Clarence says that when Morrow failed to show up for court the next morning, she knew immediately what had happened.

"Lord knows it happened to me once, back in 2001. I was gone for three years," she shares.

"I went down there for a salad and ended up missing a collective nine of my children's birthdays."

Morrow maintains that he "technically did show up to court, just it was a food court, so" – but that aside, he is overjoyed to have staggered out into the street after approximately 9,000 underground meals that each cost exactly $7.50 and left him feeling "a sort of deep-down gross" mere moments after he consumed them.

Toronto city planners agree that the financial district's interlocking network of food courts is "vast, terrifying, and not something to be entered into alone under any circumstances."

"There are 719 different courts – 719.5 if you count that weird little partial-food court that's just a Tim Horton's, a Rexall, and some public bathrooms. Anyway, they just sort of endlessly bleed into each other until you lose the will to live," explains the city's mayor, John Tory.

Morrow says that the day he descended into his own private Suzy Shier-scented hell, he spent the first five or six hours panicked and desperately trying to find a way out before gradually becoming resigned to his fate as a permanent resident of the fluorescent underworld nightmare.

"I mean, most of my needs didn't go unmet, so after a while I just stopped struggling," he explained, elaborating that when he was hungry, he bought Sbarro pizza, when he needed clean laundry, he either used the dry cleaning service or just bought "some weird, shiny polyvinyl pants from Nice Tall Man, even though I'm you know, a normally-heighted man and not usually all that nice," and when he was bored, he went to Hallmark and flipped through "all those hilarious one-liners inside the 'Son's Baptism' cards. Ha!"

Morrow says that this morning he'd started the day off by playing "how many words can you find in the term 'Jugo Juice'?" with himself when he suddenly noticed an "EXIT" sign just to the left of the cash register.

"Normally I play that game with the Starbucks sign, but today for whatever reason, I decided to take a long walk to a different court and switch it up. And thank god I did, because it – it led me to freedom," he shares, now openly weeping.

Paramedics report that Morrow is currently being treated for minor ankle injuries due to "extreme rushing toward the purest light" but is otherwise doing well and expected to make a full return to aboveground society.

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