As Sonia Silva prepared to leave work on Wednesday evening, she was asked by a colleague to help with a quick task.
It meant she missed her regular funicular ride down the hill with a work friend on their commute home from the office in the centre of Lisbon.
When she arrived at the stop a short while later, the funicular had crashed and her friend was dead.
"When I got there, it was a tragedy," she said.
Sixteen people were killed on Wednesday evening in Lisbon when its iconic 140-year-old Glória funicular derailed and crashed into a building. The Portuguese prime minister has described it as "one of the biggest human tragedies of our recent history".
