pickyourmoments

Chandler’s been in the habit of checking the door the first thing in the morning since the day he found out he was stuck in Milliways.

It took him all of a day to figure out why the Powers That Be wouldn’t let him leave, too. It wasn’t that he blamed Cal, even. He knew that he was also to blame for what happened.

That still didn’t stop him from being extremely bitter about the whole thing, though.


After about a month, he stopped expecting results. Checking the door had become something of habit; just something he did ever morning after he showered and brushed his teeth. So when he tried the door a few days ago, and it opened, well...

Well, Chandler didn’t waste any time in getting the hell out of the Bar. He never thought he’d be so happy to see those disgusting brown corridor walls in his building. He made his way straight up to number 20 and lets himself in, finding Rachel on the sofa, painting her toenails.

“Hey, Chandler,” she said dully, barely looking up at him. “Could you bring me that magazine on the counter?”

“Uh... sure,” he said, grabbing the requested magazine.

As he brought the magazine over to Rachel, he snuck a quick look out the window, glad to find the Christmas lights still up on the balcony. Monica would never let those be up past the second week of January.

“Hey, Joey was looking for you this morning,” Rachel told him as she took the magazine.

“He was?” Chandler asked, feeling his worry grow.

“Yeah, something about finding some Rangers tickets in your guys’ apartment.”

Chandler took a moment to try to remember the tickets Rachel was talking about, and everything clicked into place.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, the feeling of doom quickly lifting. “I talked to him about that, er, this afternoon.” Convinced that no one had noticed his months-long absence, he pointed back at the door. “I’m gonna, erm... go. I just wanted to... give you that.”

Lame excuse is lame, and Chandler new it. Before Rachel had a chance to question him, he was out the door and into his own apartment.

After returning from Ellen’s, Chandler had been exhausted. It hadn’t been in the plans to spend most of the night sitting outside her house, looking at the sky, but that’s what wound up happening anyway. Between that, and just the excitement from being somewhere new like that, he’d come home and went straight to bed, waking up about a day and a half later.

Apparently Joey hadn’t been too worried about him, because he left Chandler’s mail on the counter, with a note saying “Give me back my Rangers jersey, you bastard.” It’s nice to feel loved.

Finding his pay cheque in the stack of mail, Chandler quickly showered and put on a more presentable outfit. By now, the bank had closed, but there was an ATM vestibule just down at the corner. It was a quick walk, and when he got there, he was pleased to find no line, so he put his cheque into the machine and turned to leave. Just as he reached the door, the lights had gone out.

“What?” he mumbled, not sure what had just happened.

A few seconds later, a back-up generator had kicked in, and Chandler tried to open the door, which had apparently locked in some sort of failsafe.

“Oh, great. This is just...” And then he realised that he wasn’t alone. Even better, he recognised the woman he was trapped with. It’s not every day he ran into a Victoria’s Secret model, so really, it was great!

Chandler watched her from the other side of the small room as she pulled a cell phone from her hand bag. He knew she was a model, but couldn’t remember her name. She was called... something Goodacre.

“Hi, mom, it’s Jill,” she said after a few moments.

She was right. It was Jill. Chandler was trapped in an ATM vestibule with Jill Goodacre. Was it a vestibule? Maybe it was an atrium.

Right, because that was the part to be focusing on.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Jill told her mother. “I’m just stuck at the bank. In an ATM vestibule.

Chandler nodded to himself from his dark little corner. If Jill said vestibule, then he decided he’d go with vestibule.

“I’m fine. No, I’m not alone,” Jill continued. “I don’t know. Some guy.”

Up until now, Chandler hadn’t even been sure that she knew he was there. He was more used to women just looking straight through him. Lost in this thought, he hadn’t realised that he’d begun doing his nerdy white boy dance, slowly making his way across the dark room. Looking up from the floor, he realised that he had indeed caught Jill’s attention, and not in a necessarily good way, so he turned round and made his way back to the other side of the room.

After a few minutes (fourteen and a half, if Chandler was counting. Which he was), he realised that he hadn’t said a single word yet. He decided that smiling at Jill would be a good idea, and it worked. For a few moments, anyway, until he’d completely overdone it and scared her.

Luckily, her phone rang again. She answered, and seemed to immediately get sucked into an argument about a dog called Dexter peeing in her father’s shoes. There were definitely weirder conversations to be having in a blackout, but Chandler hadn’t exactly expected that.

With a sigh, Jill hung up the phone, and actually looked in Chandler direction.

“Mothers,” she said, in a tone that suggested hers was often having these sorts of issues.

“Yeah,” Chandler agreed.

Atta boy. One word! That wasn’t so hard. Chandler soon became so worked up over the fact that he’d actually talked to Jill Goodacre that he found himself smiling oddly again. He quickly straightened out his face, hoping that she hadn’t been frightened by him any further.

“Would you like to call somebody?” she offered suddenly, holding out her phone.

Yeah. About three hundred guys he’d gone to high school with. Still he nervously stepped forward and took the proffered phone.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said. He’d never used a cell phone before, so it was a brief struggle to figure out how to make the stupid thing work, but he figured it out quickly enough, and called the one person he knew would be home: Monica.

She seemed relieved to hear from him, and immediately asked where he was. Apparently, he was the only one not over at hers. Not wanting to embarrass himself further, he answered Monica’s question in the secret mumbly code he and Joey had made up for just these sorts of occasions.

Completely unsurprisingly, Monica couldn’t understand a single word he’d said.

“Put Joey on the phone,” Chandler said, exasperated.

“What’s up, man?” Joey asked when he got the phone.

Chandler repeated exactly what he’d told Monica, about how he was trapped in an ATM vestibule with Jill Goodacre.

After a few moments of silence, during which Joey had presumably translated this message to the rest of the apartment, Joey passed on his own message, advising Chandler to try to be anything other than himself, because he tends to screw these things up.

Like that thought hadn’t entered Chandler’s mind already. He hung up the phone and passed it back to Jill, before returning to his side of the vestibule. After a few moments, she moved her handbag over to the counter closer to the light and started digging through it.

“Would you like some gum?” she offered.

“Oh, is it sugarless?”

Jill looked at it. “Sorry, it’s not.”

“Oh, then no thanks.” Chandler wasn’t quite sure why he’d said that. It was a stupid thing to say. Stupid, stupid, stupid. If Jill Goodacre offers you gum, you take it. If she offers you mangled animal carcass, you take it.

“You know, on second thought, gum would be perfection.”

Gum would be perfection? What the hell was that? He mentally kicked the crap out of himself as he took the piece of gum from her fingers, and walked to the far side of the room. He could have said ‘gum would be nice,’ or ‘I’ll have a stick,’ but no. For him, gum was perfection. Self-loathing had never been such an art form.

Maybe if he blew a bubble, it would make up for his idiocy. Bubbles are good. They have a boyish charm; they’re impish. How could this plan possibly fail?

Well, that was an easy answer, as it turned out, which Chandler discovered by accidentally gobbing his gum at a bulletin board. Nice going, imp.

But it was an easy fix. All he had to do was reach over, and put the gum back in his mouth.

Only, it was someone else’s gum. He was chewing someone else’s gum. This horror was short-lived, though, because he very shortly after started choking on someone else’s gum.

“Are you all right?” Jill asked, looking up at him from where she’d sat on the floor. “Oh, my god. You’re choking!” He rushed over to him and immediately performed the Heimlich manoeuvre on him, both saving his life and causing him to quite disgustingly spit out someone else’s gum.

“Better?” she asked.

Chandler nodded weakly. “Yes,” he managed. “Thank you. That was... That was...”

“Perfection?” Jill offered.

Yep, he still hated himself.

*   *   *

”Chandler, we’ve been here for an hour doing this. Now watch, it’s easy.”

“Okay.”

“Ready?”

They sat across from one another on the floor underneath one of the counters, with the pens the bank kept chained down hanging in front of them. Jill grabbed the pen and whipped it around, sending it flying in neat little circles while she bobbed her head around it.

“Okay, now try it,” she said once her pen lost momentum.

Chandler grabbed the pen and tried to flick it the same way she had, but it only came back and hit him in the face.

“No, you whip it,” Jill instructed.

Chandler tried again, and this time, the pen came back and nearly took his eye out, sending both of them ducking for cover. As they laughed together on the floor, the lights flickered back to life suddenly, and the mechanically-locked door clanged loudly.

“Oh, the power’s back on,” Chandler pointed out, watching as Jill got to her feet and fetched up her handbag.

“Well, this has been fun,” she said.

“Yes,” Chandler responded. “Thanks for... letting me use your phone, and for saving my life.”

“Well, goodbye, Chandler. I had a great blackout.” Before Chandler realised what she was doing, Jill leaned in and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “See ya.”

He watched as she walked out to the street, pressing himself up against the glass door. As he leaned against the door, it occurred to him that nobody was going to believe any of this. He jumped away from the door and stood in the security camera’s line of sight.

“Hi, uhm... I’m account number 7143457, and uh, I don’t know if you got any of that, but I would really like a copy of the tape.”

[ bits of dialogue taken from, and Chandler’s inner monologue modified from Episode 01x07: The One With the Blackout ]

“To hell with hockey! Let’s all do that!”

Chandler watched as Ross moved from the sofa to the front door of Central Perk.

“Come on, Ross,” he pleaded. “You, me, Joey, ice, guy’s night out. Come on, what do you say, big guy? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

Ross stepped away from Chandler, as he continued to fake punch him in the stomach. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

Eventually, Chandler and Joey managed to wear Ross down into going to the Rangers game with them, with the promise of buying him one of those big foam hands.

Which is how, four hours later, the three of them found themselves in the emergency room at Bellevue. Once Ross got forgot about Carol, they were able to actually start enjoying the night. The seats were great, even if not all next to one another. And close enough that Ross was able to catch a puck.

Okay, he did catch the puck with his face, but he still caught it.

“Listen, it’s kind of an Emergency,” Chandler said to the bitchy woman behind the counter. “Well, I guess you’d know that, otherwise we’d be in the predicament room.”

He laughed nervously as the Godzilla woman looked at him. “Hold on,” she said to whomever she was speaking with on the telephone. She turned to Chandler and Joey, tossing a clipboard in their direction. “Fill this out. Sit over there.”

It soon became clear that she didn’t care about Ross’ dented face, and the three of them quickly made their way to a row of seats.

It was only a matter of minutes before Joey found an unattended wheelchair, and was begging Chandler to push him around in it. And it was a matter of seconds before Chandler obliged Joey, and pushed him straight down a corridor, sending him crashing into a trolley.

“Now you’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life!” Chandler shouted at him. “You’ll never walk again!”

It was just then when a man with a broken leg was wheeled by. Chandler jumped at the severe look he got from both the man, and the other guy pushing the chair.


They sat in the waiting room almost two hours before Ross was finally seen by someone. By that point, Chandler had found a cache of medical tape, which he and Joey had used on their faces. They weren’t trying to accomplish anything, other than pissing off the Godzilla woman. And it worked, obviously, because she threatened to call security on them. Eventually, they managed to calm down, and even had a pleasant conversation about how Ross had only ever slept with one woman.

Not that Chandler was in any position to judge, but as far as anyone else knew, even he had a few on Ross. It was an utter lie, but no one had to know that.

Eventually, well after midnight, Ross finally emerged from a corridor with the biggest piece of face gear taped to his face Chandler had ever seen. He walked up to the counter and tossed his clipboard down.

“Oh,” the Godzilla Woman said, not even trying to hide her laughter. “That’s attractive.”

Chandler had tried to be nice, but now, he couldn’t resist jumping in as well. “Oh, I thought you were great in Silence of the Lambs,” he told Ross, who was less than amused. “Oh, come on. Admit it. All things considered, you had fun tonight.”

“Fun?” Ross asked. “Where was the fun? Tell me specifically, which part was the fun part? And where’s my puck?”

Joey started to stutter, and then turned round. “The kid has it,” he said, pointing to a young boy sitting where Ross had been seated earlier.

“The kid?” Ross asked. He pushed past Joey and Chandler, making his way to the boy. “Uh, excuse me. That’s my puck.

The kid turned round in his seat. “I found it,” he said. “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”

Ross was at a loss. He looked up at Chandler, hoping for some adult advice.

“You gotta do it, man,” Chandler said with a shrug.

Sighing, Ross turned back to the boy. “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you—I can’t do it.”

At least he tried. Chandler patted him on the shoulder before making his way to the other side of the waiting room. Ross, deciding to be the grown up in all this, sat down on the seat directly behind the boy.

“Listen, gimme back my puck,” he said.

“No,” the boy replied.

“Yes, how ‘bout?”

Before anyone realised what was happening, Ross had engaged the boy in a tug of war over the puck, both of them shouting over who the rightful owner was, while Chandler and Joey watched on from a distance.

“Hey! Hey!” the Godzilla Woman called. “No rough-housing in my ER!”

The tug of war over the puck ended quickly when the boy suddenly let go. Not prepared for such a turn of events, Ross lost his grip on it, and it flew across the ER, hitting the Godzilla woman in the face, which in turn sent her straight to the floor. The four of them all looked to see if the Godzilla woman would get up, suddenly having forgotten all about the puck.

“Now that was fun,” Ross conceded.

[ Bits of dialogue taken from Episode 01x04: The One With George Stephanopoulos ]

It’s all Joey’s fault. If he hadn’t landed that part, Chandler wouldn’t have needed to show him how to properly smoke a cigarette. And then he wouldn’t have gotten hooked again, which would mean he wouldn’t have been smoking in the office, which means that he wouldn’t have accidentally sprayed aerosol air freshener into his mouth just now.

After gagging for a few minutes, he finally gives in and rushes for the men’s room and tries to rinse out his mouth in the sink. That is to say, he turns the tap on full force and just sticks his face under the running water.

“You all right, Bing?” someone asks casually from behind him.

Chandler looks up into the mirror, his front completely soaked from the sink. He sees a man he doesn’t recognise standing behind him, so he just nods.

“Yeah, I was running late this morning, so I thought I’d save time by showering here.”

The man gives him a worried look before leaving Chandler to finish up whatever it is that he’s doing. Still gagging on the taste (and apple vanilla air freshener doesn’t taste anything like apple OR vanilla), he gets a good look at himself and realises the extent of the damage.

Panicking, he rips a handful of paper towels from the dispenser and tries to dry himself off, but only accomplishes shredding the towels on his shirt, leaving little white balls of gooey paper on his chest.

He knows that if he hangs out in the men’s room for very long, someone’s going to notice him missing. On the other hand, he knows that if he goes back to his desk looking like he just went down a Slip’n’Slide, someone’s bound to notice that he’s been up to no good.

He does keep a spare shirt in his locker, but the problem at this point is getting out there, getting the shirt, and getting back to the men’s room to change. Still, that’s the best option, so he goes for it. He carefully opens the door and slips outside, ducking and weaving behind chairs and unused cubicles before getting to his row of lockers against the far wall. He takes a few minutes to wrestle with the combination and quietly as he can, opens the door and pulls the shirt out.

The shirt that’s apparently been in the locker for quite some time, and is in a permanently wrinkled ball of cotton.

Still, it’s better than being wet all day.

He takes it back to the men’s room and changes, cringing at himself in the mirror. It’s beyond bad, so he takes it off again and tries to shake it out, hoping to get some of the creases to fade. It almost helps, but he’s pushing his luck as it is, and just puts the shirt back on and heads back out to his cubicle.

He doesn’t get two steps out the door before he’s stopped by a junior supervisor.

“Bing, there you are,” he says.

“Here I am,” Chandler agrees, steeling himself for a reprimand.

“System went down again, so you might as well just make an early day of it.” He pats Chandler lightly on the shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”

Chandler watches him walk off, and decides that what he really needs right now is a cigarette.