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.