Adventures in Awkwardland, Episode 4: Mandy's Monday Commute

Considering something awkward—and often, awesomely, incredibly, painfully awkward—happens to "Mandy" on a near-daily basis, it would be unfair not to share some of these moments with you. If nothing else, it will leave you with the relief and satisfaction that you are not as clumsy, nerdy, and as all-around socially awkward as she is.

Now that Mandy is using public transportation on a daily basis to commute to her internship, it has inevitably opened up new windows of awkwardness. Until this fateful day, nothing too exciting or painful had happened, with one exception: On her first day of interning, Mandy got on the train and made the rookie mistake of making direct eye contact with the bum screaming to the invisible person on the seat next to him. So of course, he decided to look right at Mandy while screaming repeatedly, “THE MOTHER FUCKER FUCKER FUCKERS! THE MOTHER FUCKERS TOOK IT! YOU SAW THEM!” The older lady next to her then looked at Mandy as if she was the one screaming nonsensical profanities in her ear, so Mandy shrank lower and lower in her seat and pretended to be invisible.

After Mandy made my switch from the Blue to the Green line, she was still a little shook up from that encounter, so she sat down next to a harmless looking young woman who was sitting with her kid on her lap. She took a deep breath, smiled at the person sitting across the aisle from me—another Hoosier faux-pas, apparently, as he responded by grimacing and averting eye contact—and opened up her bottle of “sparkling water beverage.” It exploded. Mandy quickly apologized and asked the woman next to her if she got any of it on her: “Not yet,” she responded, in a tone that suggested if and when it does, Mandy might die. Her cute little girl pointed and laughed at Mandy as the water continued to spill out of the bottle, and all over her pants.

Five minutes later, Miss Mandy enters her new office looking as though she might have peed her pants.

Yet, somehow, that incident was nothing compared to this particular morning’s commute. As Mandy was transferring from the blue to green line, she was riding up the escalator in the usual Monday morning daze, listening to her iPod, fairly oblivious to her surroundings. Right before she reached the top of the escalator, she noticed the enormous man ahead of her on the escalator balancing a trolley loaded with boxes. Just as Mandy started thinking that a trolley on an escalator looks a little dangerous, the enormous man with said trolley gets stuck at the top. Before she could react, Mandy slammed into him and was suddenly trapped on a moving escalator, tangled between a giant, the trolley wheel, and the side of the escalator. The guy behind her somehow jumps over the side of the escalator but doesn’t bother to try to help either of them. Meanwhile, all of the people on the train platform ahead are now staring at the trolly and the giant as Mandy yelped, her headphones fell out of my ears, and he attempted to lift Mandy over the trolley and off the escalator. In this process, her ribcage slams against the trolley, the giant and Mandy accidentally go to second base, and Mandy fell to her knees but finally escaped.

Once the giant trolley man got off the escalator—somehow, without mangling anyone else—he started to stroll past her as Mandy limped to the side, clutching her ribcage. “Oh, are you okay?” he asked casually, as though nothing dramatic and possibly life-threatening had just happened.

Her thoughts: "AM I OKAY?!?! It’s 9 AM, I almost met my death on an escalator, and you just touched my boob. NO, I'M NOT OKAY!"

Her response: "Yeah, sure, whatever, I'm fine."

It’s the kind of situation that makes a person want to start screaming, “THE MOTHER FUCKER FUCKER FUCKERS! YOU SAW THEM!”