I’ve had some interesting experiences riding Metro over the years, but nothing like what happened as I went to work last night.

The earlier ones all fell on the entertaining end of the scale, from the guy who said loudly that his little niece “sucks,” the man and woman who got in an argument over a child eating Burger King on the train, or the guy who got his arm stuck in the door meaning his coffee made it on but he did not.

Last night was different, and I don’t tell this story for kudos or credit, but because it really made me angry how some people can treat others with such little respect.  As human beings, that’s one of the basic things we can do every day.  It should be our default.  It wasn’t for this guy on the orange line.

A few stops into my trip, he got on the train with a group of other people, including a young blonde woman.  Just to give you a picture of the scene, here’s a terrible graphic of where the key players settled:

I had a pen and legal pad out, trying to craft a scene between two characters who are playing that game where you say three things and the other person guesses which one is a lie. To my right, I heard faint mumbling from the guy.  It wasn’t loud enough for me to make out anything, but it went on for a few minutes.  The young woman started shuffling in her seat, and in the only quick glance I made at that time, it looked like she was winding up her headphones and packing up her stuff as if she were about to get off at the next stop.  She did get up, but only to move seats:

Note her new location, behind me and to the right.  That move told me all I needed to know about that
mumbling — clearly she was uncomfortable being near the guy.  Her respite lasted only about 30 seconds, because the creep couldn’t take no for an answer and moved closer to her to resume his mumbling:

I looked straight at him and watched as she said something back, which I didn’t catch, but prompted him to immediately make the ultimate harassing move of sitting in the seat next to her. There was no way she could escape:

She made the perfect move, immediately getting up and sternly saying, “Let me out.”  A moment later, I was standing above him with my hand gripping his shoulder and telling him, “You need to move right now.”

In the next moment, I thought I was going to get in my first ever Metro fist fight.  He didn’t appreciate me confronting him and demanded that I take my hands off him.  Unfortunately for him, I’m more than willing to inflict that kind of disrespect on someone who is acting the way he was — especially toward a young woman.  I looked him square in the eyes and told him again to let her out.  He did.

The creep slinked away to the front of our part of the car, wearing an expression on his face as if to say to everyone else, “Man, can you believe how I was just treated?!”  There wasn’t an ounce of sympathy for him, just looks of disgust.  Two stops later, he got off the train.

Meanwhile, an older woman had gone back to talk to the young woman, and from their conversation behind me it was clear that she was both okay and surrounded by people who were prepared to look out for her.

A guy sitting nearby came up to me later and thanked me for “stepping up,” saying that he felt a weird vibe about the creep as soon as he got on the train, but was in the kind of commuting daze we all slip into when things got serious.

As the train was about to pull into a station a few stops from my own, there was a tap on my shoulder from behind.

“Hey.  Thanks for helping me.”

It’s a cliche that we often think we know how we would react in certain situations, but that we never truly know until it happens.  I hope we live in a world where people can understand simple concepts like if a woman doesn’t want to talk to you, then you need to leave her alone.  But in reality, I hope we all have someone nearby willing to help, because we all need it sometimes.

I have a friend at the Vienna Metro station.  Her name is Mercedes.

Well, I call her Mercedes, mainly because the only thing I know about her is that she drives a Mercedes.  She’s there in the parking garage most mornings when I get off the train after work — lower level, right in the corner where she can see everyone who walks in.

At first, I very much despised Mercedes.  She always seems to be in a massive hurry, and would follow me as I walked to my car like a lion waiting for the precise moment to pounce on its prey.  I thought I was going to be run over at 4 mph.

But then I realized the situation was partly my fault.  I used to park several rows away, meaning she really had no choice but to follow just behind me.  Sometimes I would even take an odd route to try to get myself some distance, but really that was kind of a jerk move.  The whole thing looked like this:

Now Mercedes and I are on better terms.  I often waive to her and flash a smile in her direction.  Sometimes she even smiles back.

Our big breakthrough came about two weeks ago.  There’s another regular spot stalker, a guy I’ll call Peter.  I have no idea what he drives, but he looks kind of like a Peter.  I loathe him.  He’s not as bad as far as driving behind me in a menacing fashion, but when I get into my car, he always parks in a way that forces me to go the long way out of the garage.

On the big day, Mercedes was idling in front of Peter about 10 cars down from where I now park in the first row.  If it’s just her, she’ll wait for me to walk past and then back up until she’s just beyond my car, leaving me enough room to get out the preferred way.  This time, she did that, but after she slalomed in reverse around Peter.  It was an aggressive move that made me laugh.  I don’t think Peter enjoyed it as much.

I guess that just goes to show how you should never write someone off, and how far a little humor can go in breaking the ice in any relationship.  Or that you could just leave five minutes earlier and not stress so much about a parking space.

For a long time, Metro stations played a message over the PA system that said something like, “If this is your first time riding with us, here are some things you need to know…Our doors are not like elevator doors — they will not re-open automatically…”

It seemed like they played the message all the time, and as a seasoned rider I found it kind of annoying. But clearly the folks at Metro should bring it back based on what I witnessed on my way home this morning.

I usually try to get on the last car on the train, both because it tends to be the least crowded and it puts me close to the escalator when I reach my destination. The things I see during the ride are completely by chance. The scenery depends on who gets on the same car, which direction I happen to be facing and a bevy of mystery factors.

Today those added up to me being eight feet from a guy who thought the train doors worked like elevator doors, and would open if he just stuck his arm in there. Oh, and the arm he stuck in the car happened to be holding a cup of coffee.

The result? This:

There was a moment of pure amazement on his face as he realized the door wasn’t going to open. He gave his arm (the right one) a slight yank, and it barely budged. His face turned to “oh crap” and he made a very poor decision in a moment of panic. The correct move would have been to use his other hand to help pry the doors open enough to get the coffee hand out — not too difficult, I have seen similar acts done before.

But in his moment of panic, he gave his right hand one big yank. That move left the lid and half the coffee on the inside of the train (as seen on the left), while the cup and the rest of the coffee stayed on the outside of the train (as seen on the right).

The icing on the proverbial cake was the guy standing next to Mr. Coffee, who found the situation just as funny as I did and didn’t hold back in his laughter.

Fortunately for Mr. Now-Coffee-Less, I’m sure the incident woke him up far better than that coffee ever could.

I came to the conclusion this morning that I should not listen to potentially comical things on my iPod while riding the Metro.

If you have never been to Washington, D.C., let me try to characterize the atmosphere on a Metro train. Unless you are sitting next to someone you know, there’s a good chance you are sitting in silence. That may be while listening to an iPod or reading a book, or just staring at some nebulous space in the front of the car.

During rush hour, when the trains are full of commuters, the silence can seem magnified.

So imagine the scene as I step onto a packed morning train. White headphones are pressed into my ears. A podcast that began playing as I waited on the platform is the soundtrack to my ride home.

The faces around me are checked out — a semi-catatonic state brought on by the morning commute. The only sound they hear are the wheels grinding along the tracks and the occasional garbled station names being blasted out over the loudspeaker. I can hear a little of that too through the headphones, but mostly I am lost in some piece of radio magic. Fortunately, I get off at the end of the line, so I don’t have to pay the least bit of attention as the stops go by.

And then it happens. There’s a joke, a humorous comment, a funny aside. I am about to draw the attention of those around me who are even half awake. The joke moves through my ears and into my brain. It is processed. The humor reactors are put on notice. A pulse of instructions runs to my face. The brain wants to laugh.

But wait, there’s another emergency instruction. Another part of the brain is ordering an override of the laugh instruction.

“NO NO NO! Abort!”

It is too late. I do my best to hold my mouth shut — teeth clenched, trying in vain to suppress the overwhelming smile and the urge to chuckle.

The morning silence broken, there is only one thing I can do: Look out the window as if to say, “There’s nothing to see here.”