Recently had acid at a concert, figuring we'd handle the Uber home fine. Nope... nooooo... The driver was super chatty. A guy didn't use his indicator and the driver complained about it, kicking off a friend ranting about how it in itself is an indicator of the beginning of the downfall of society. We'd literally just covered a block and our plans to just shut the fuck up have already unravelled.
I'm thinking to myself, "Please shut up. Please shut up."
Then I intervened and tried to get everyone acting cool again before my own brain started going down rabbit holes mid-sentence faster than my words could keep up. Suddenly I'm on the rant for what feels like forever before I catch myself, realise it wasn't that long, and we're barely a few minutes into a 15 min ride. It was then I realised we were in trouble and had an eternity of this to go.
It was all catastrophic when someone's rant ended in crippling silence and someone would get the bright idea to try recover by small talking with the driver. The poor guy...
When we got home, I was suffocating in awkwardness, and got out of the car like someone just did a horrible fart in there. My brain's battling itself over whether to apologise and say we're philosophy majors or something and thank the driver. But I knew that was going to be fuel on the fire and envisioned myself talking this guy's ear off on the street while he's awkwardly trying to drive away from my 30 minute long apology; that was 10s apology and 29m analogies and tangents justifying my train of thought until I'm convinced the guy gets it. Just had to focus on shutting the fuck up, walking forward, and getting inside the house.
We all got inside and were immediately relieved. I tried to say, "Well, I think that went well." but we were in stitches before I could finish the sentence.
In hindsight, we're experienced enough, and I dunno why we thought it'd be fine and wouldn't play out exactly like it did.