Ali’s Awesomely Awkward Adventures: Monday Commute Edition

Considering something awkward—and often, awesomely, incredibly, painfully awkward—happens to me on a near-daily basis, it would be unfair not to share some of these moments with you, the readers of my blog. 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 me.

Now that I’m using public transportation on a daily basis to commute to my internship, it has inevitably opened up new windows of awkwardness. Until today, nothing too exciting or painful had happened, with one exception: My first day of interning, I got on the train, and I 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 me while screaming repeatedly, “THE MOTHER FUCKER FUCKER FUCKERS! THE MOTHER FUCKERS TOOK IT! YOU SAW THEM!” The older lady next to me then looked at me as if I was the one screaming nonsensical profanities in her ear, so I shrank lower and lower in my seat and pretended to be invisible.

After I made my switch from the Blue to the Green line, I was still a little shook up from that encounter, so I sat down next to a harmless looking young woman who was sitting with her kid on her lap. I 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 I opened up my bottle of “sparkling water beverage.” It exploded. I quickly apologized and asked the woman next to me if I got any of it on her: “Not yet,” she responded, in a tone that suggested if and when it does, I might die. Her cute little girl points and laughs at me as the water continues to spill out of the bottle, and all over my pants.

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

Yet, somehow, that incident was nothing compared to this morning’s commute. As I'm transferring from the blue to green line at the Clark/Lake stop, I’m riding up the escalator in my Monday morning daze, listening to my iPod, fairly oblivious to my surroundings. Right before I reach the top of the escalator, I notice the enormous man ahead of me on the escalator balancing a trolley loaded with boxes. Just as I’m thinking that a trolley on an escalator looks a little dangerous, the enormous man with said trolley gets stuck at the top. Before I can react, I slam into him and am suddenly trapped on a moving escalator, tangled between a giant, the trolley wheel, and the side of the escalator. The guy behind me somehow jumps over the side of the escalator but doesn’t bother to try to help either of us. Meanwhile, all of the people on the train platform ahead are now staring at me and the giant as I yelp, my headphones fall out of my ears, and he attempts to lift me over the trolley and off the escalator. In this process, my ribcage slams against the trolley, the giant and I accidentally go to second base, and I almost fall as I finally escape.

Once the giant trolley man gets off the escalator—somehow, without mangling anyone else—he starts to stroll past me as I limp to the side, clutching my ribcage. “Oh, are you okay?” he asks casually, as though nothing dramatic and possibly life-threatening had just happened.

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!

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