Maybe it’s the high concentration of irresistibly sexy people riding buses. Maybe it’s the feeling of community that results from the shared ride. Maybe it’s the opportunity afforded by the uninterrupted time in the same space. Heck, maybe it’s boredom. Whatever the reason, buses seem to encourage people to hook up — or, at least to make their best effort at it. We bus riders have a name for this bus-based attempted hook-up: the bus mack.

A bus mack (not to be confused with bus luh, which involves an established, mutual attraction) occurs when one bus rider approaches another in a way that indicates romantic and/or sexual interest. In a typical bus mack scenario: An attractive person gets on. A head turns. Some nervous (or scheming) fidgeting ensues. Before you know it, the head turner is changing seats. And we’re off.

The majority of bus macks are unsuccessful, partly because the majority of pick ups, bus-based or otherwise, are unsuccessful, and partly because of the stigma associated with the bus. Even the people on the bus judge other riders, assuming they’re weird, or crazy, or (gasp!) too poor to afford a car. (This is probably why many men begin bus macks something like this: “Yeah, you know my Caddy is in the shop....”)

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on your need for entertainment and your threshold for painfully embarrassing situations), bus macks are unsuccessful in a very public forum. I have witnessed more than one would-be macker crash and burn — most often due to wildly optimistic selection of mackee — in front of an audience. The worst was a couple of years ago, on a southbound, late-afternoon 7. A beautiful young woman sitting directly in front of me suddenly stood up and let out an indignant yelp. She waited until she had the entire bus’s attention and then leaned toward the not-so-young man seated across the aisle. “You want my phone number?!” she shouted. “You. Want. My. Phone number. For what?”

Most mackees are not interested in embarrassing themselves or others with such dramatic scenes. In fact, some people invest a fair amount of effort in bus-mack prevention. My friend Monique, with whom I rode many a bus back in college, and who is a frequent target of unwelcome bus macks, advises: “Wear sunglasses and earphones and have a book. No hand, eye, or ear contact.”