and i jump up and scramble to turn it down

I smile and move slightly from time to time but I don't do anything embarassing.

I mouth words to songs when I listen to them and sometimes sing to them. Fuck the rest of the bus.

a friend and i always used to do hand actions (sort of act out what the words say) to songs and sing-a-long on train journeys.

Unfortunately we'd always take the earphone out and then realise just how loud we were singing.

It didn't stop us from doing it again though.

when I was 16/17 I went round for a friend while I was on acid. He wasn't in but his very nice and deeply religious parents/sister invited me in. Don't ask me why but I went in ffs. They gave me sandwiches and a cup of tea but I was getting drawn into the tv and felt they must be noticing I was out of my face and stood up to say goodbye. I had my walkman with me and a set of inner-ear headphones. The headphones fell out of my pocket and I crushed them into the carpet under my boot by accident. We all stopped to look at them and it was as though time had stopped, the moment seemed to last for ages and somehow had a great deal of importance attached to it

apart from that, one of my cousins in Rotterdam walking in on me during the night at her place while I was listening to Sugar on the headphones and vigorously investigating some, ahem, art pamphlets I'd bought in Amsterdam :(

when I got my Grado SR80's I went for a week with wearing them whilst driving, fair to say I got a few funny looks while singing the lyrics to Tom Vek but I didnae give a fook. The time came to stop when i realised I couldn't hear my car's engine resulting in many screaming starts from the traffic lights!

is kinda old, it was a Rob Newman joke on Mary Whitehouse Experience

I walked into a pub to meet a few friends with headphones on. Sorta in my own little world, as one is, completely oblivious to everything around me.

Long story short, a couple of ladies opened the door for me, and I just stumbled through it and mumbled a 'sorry' or a grunt or something. They went absolutely mental at me for being so rude, in front of the entire pub. Which was pretty embarassing. But I deserved it, in all fairness.

From that day on, I always take my earphones off before getting into situations where social interactions might be necessary. A lesson for you all.

i was on summer holiday from uni, went out for a few drinks with friends and came home a bit drunk early in the morning. so as not to wake my dad, I stuck my headphones into the stereo and listened to the portishead nyc album quite loudly. unfortunately i'd stuck my headphone jack in the "line-in" socket and so the loud music that i thought was coming through my headphones was actually blasting out of the speaker. needless to say, my dad wasn't in the mood to appreciate the theremin solo on "mysterons" at two in the morning...

on a Ricky Gervais stand up?

I always take ages to realise people are talking to me at bus stops when I've got music pumping into my ears. I just stand there looking at them ildly for ages. Then they give up.

I was on the bus doing the same journey I did every day. My big chunky headphones were on as usual, I was listening to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain if I remember correctly. I had gotten into Pavement late in the game, traversing through their discography in reverse chronological order. As I heard Malkmus getting younger and younger, something happened that I don't think I'll ever forget. As the bus came to stop at a nondescript stop en route, my eyes fell to the door as I did my usual scan of those coming on board, voyeuristically eyeing up each and every person who came aboard the bus.

Old lady, full of himself, doesn't like razors, more ear piercings than ear-

And then...

She came aboard. Hers was a beauty not of convention. This wasn't a face that you'd see on the front of vogue, or Cosmo. There was a warmth in her eyes that destroyed your defences the moment they gazed your way. Her dress sense was of a having-fun-at-the-charity-shop style, yet you could tell from the care in her outfit that this was an intentional voice of her personality, her image, what she wanted to project on the world. I shuffled deeper into my seat in the hope that she would sit in the opposite chair of my four spacer. As she took each step, I held my breath and channelled a vain telepathy towards her to guide her to my platform. When she turned and rested herself within a metre of me, my heart sang with life. I assure you, this obsessive feeling came as much of a shock to me. I'm not the sort of person who does anything other than drift off into my own reality during a bus journey. When so confined with others, I take solace in allowing my imagination to run free whilst watching the constantly changing yet oh so consistent scenery on the outside.

I couldn't help myself but to look into her eyes. Her eyes which I lost myself in. Her eyes which spoke more to me than I could imagine her mouth ever could. I didn't know a thing about this person, but had already evangelised them in my mind. Each moment I caught a nervous glance from myself to her or vice versa began to make me wonder the impossible. Was she feeling the same way? Did she have the same epiphany? Adrenaline pumped through me involuntarily as a life together unfurled in my mind. Imagery from an imaginary prequel to The Grapes Of Wrath unfurled in my mind. Life on the farm, living off the fat of the land.

I looked up at her once again to take a mental snapshot of the situation and to my absolute surprise she was staring right back at me. I watched her lips move whilst being told to Cut My Hair by Malkmus. I frantically pulled at my headphones in a way with so little grace to appear as an animal. I tried to keep cool but I just couldn't. I pulled my pants down, climbed up on the neighbouring chair and pooed on her head. As I looked down at the horror on her face, I finished the job with a good old fashioned vomit / piss combo all over her.

Apparently the cultural differences were too much and we were not meant to be.

as good as the farting or pooing/vomitting/pissing stories but I was on the bus last week and it was completely full and I was listening to Mogwai and it went really quiet. I wasn't quite with it so I turned the volume all the way up and it was still really quiet then all of a sudden the music came back in and I actualy let out a quite a loud yelping sound, which was pretty embarassing!

on my laptop, This Is Hardcore by Pulp came on and I didn't skip 'cause I wasn't really listening to it, I was in my own little world absorbed in fascinating Chemistry coursework...I didn't realise the headphones weren't plugged in properly until my mother asked me to turn the music off.
I always check now :/

a few years ago, listening to music and turned it up when Freak Scene came on. A woman in her mid 20's who was sitting about four seats away at the other side of the carriage came over and asked me to turn it down. Dead inside, obviously

the wire is like 10m long and gets tangled into a big morass and takes up my whole bag and makes me look bad.