For some reason, I was just thinking about my first job after graduating secretarial school. The secretarial school was very, very intense and everyone they spilled out was supposed to be well-equipped for any secretarial job.
Fast forward to a few months into the job…we were working on some major project (it’s been a while; I can’t remember exactly) and I was retyping this legal letter that we had to re-produce on our own stationary. It was about 15 pages long. Well, in my infinite wisdom, I changed ALL the legal wording because the whole thing just sounded “too strange” to me as it was. Of course, 15 pages later, my boss looked at it and informed me that it was supposed to use that language and that it was a typical LEGAL letter. I think I was there until something like 9:00 p.m. redoing the whole thing.
So, 18 years later, I still absolutely cringe and what a freaking idiot I was. Anyone want to make me feel less alone?
I would really like to think that I had “no regrets” with the choices I’ve made and the course of action and behavior I have followed, but it just isn’t the case.
The sheer volume of things that make me cringe would cripple this message board and may pose a threat to the continued existance of the internet as a whole! Clearly impossible to even scratch the surface.
But I get a little better everyday!
There seems to be a positive correlation between my age and my father’s IQ.
My first job out of college required no effort from me so I needed something to fill the hours of nothing. I surfed the web and created those email surveys for my friends in the office. A new guy, John, had started a couple weeks ago. So, I came up with the ultimate list of songs that get stuck in your head. I titled the email “You Give Love a Bad Name”. Typed in my friend’s names - expecting Outlook to fill in the addresses.
Well, since John was new I hadn’t gotten around to entering his email address. So, I sent this email to John Something - a board member!!! Luckily, he had a great sense of humor
Here’s another one from childhood. (Although I am a complete moron on a day-to-day basis, it really takes time for these things to properly haunt you
When I was a wee lass, I was buying my sister a Christmas present and got her a tie clip from Spencers. I had it engraved with her inititals. I thought it was a pin. I just remember her opening it and my mother (who I had proudly shown this thing to immediately after buying it) saying that she would “explain” to my sister how to use it.
I accepted a job that required a great deal of people skills, even though I knew that I had none to begin with.
Even so, I thought I would be able to figure it out as I went along, but the job quickly became a hideous nightmare.
I have such embarrassment over having done extremely well as a college student and then being so inept in the real world.
My entire romantic history. And the story I submitted to my college literary magazine freshman year.
There are lots of little social missteps that I try to avoid recalling as well, but I take comfort in the fact that nobody could possibly remember them except me.
It’s always the little things that make you cringe, because with the big things, you’re forced to forgive yourself as a survival tactic.
The one that comes to mind for me was when I got the opportunity to teach a self-designed English elective course at a private high school. Unfortunately, a big family emergency forced me to resign the position after I’d taught only one class (in a series of ten), so the school had to find a replacement for me. The head of the school’s English department asked one of my students for a copy of my syllabus to give to the new teacher . . .
. . . which is where she learned that I’d eliminated one of the papers required for the course (guidelines for all of the elective courses indicated that the students were to write two papers, but I decided to change that) AND that I’d blatantly promised (in writing, mind you) that anyone who handed in another one of the required assignments (an outline) would get an “A” on it.
Yeah. She wasn’t happy.
Eventually, I called her to apologize (having been informed of her wrath by another teacher at the school), and all was well, but that’s one of my cringe-worthy moments.
Well, that and the stories I told the kids in the one class I did teach (I get verbal diarrhea when I’m nervous) . . .
When I was about seven or eight I made a comment that at 25 I still havn’t been able to live down and I cringe everytime Mom brings it up…
At that age I was starting to take an interest in science and in figuring out how things work and was just starting to figure out things for myself, to start to make connections. Unfortunately I was also watching a lot of TV, and more importantly TV commericals. TV commercials for feminine hygiene products, speficially those used to treat yeast infections. Based on those commericals I figured out that sometimes women have yeast “down there.” I also knew that yeast was used in making bread.
So one night the whole family was in the car going out to do something… when I asked, in all innocence and sincerity: “Mom, next time you get a yeast infection can we mix in some flour and water and make bread?”
Both parents were laughing so hard they had to pull over for several minutes before it was safe to drive again. I still hear about that one to this day. I will never, ever be allowed to live that one down. I’m cringing and blushing just writing about it.
The other big cringer, isn’t because it’s embarrassing like above but because thinking about make me feel like a complete idiot. The first semester of my freshman year in college I had this girl in one of my classes that I really got along with well. She was smart, pretty, laughed at my jokes (made me laugh a lot too) and all around a really cool person. We hung out all the time outside class, ate lunch together near daily and were practically inseperatable during our free time on campus. Whenever we were walking somewhere she’d try and hold my hand or kinda bump into me, in class she’d get bored and poke me in the ribs (I’m very tickelish) etc… Sounds like typical behavior for a new couple right? Here’s why I cringe when I think of this:
The whole time I knew her that semester it never occured to me that she * liked * me. I never saw her off of campus and didn’t even get her phone number till xmas break, when she gave it to me and asked me to call if I wanted to see her over break. After class had been out a week I finally figured out what had been going on and was so embarassed about my lack of clue that I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone and call her. I saw her from time to time on campus afterwards but we never really spoke again, in retrospect I probably hurt her feelings pretty badly. So I have two reasons to cringe over this story.
auntie em, you just continue to make me laugh. I’ve referenced it a couple of times, but one post of yours induced an extended laughing fit, complete w/tears.
