Not to pressure you (too much), but right now, that incident has power over you. Things I’ve kept hidden have been more embarrassing to me than the things that are public knowledge, regardless of the seriousness of the issues.
Just my $0.02. Do as you see fit.
I was working for a beer distributor, and the building had a 2-story glass vestibule at the entrance. The state sales director for this major beer company was visting for the day, and was right behind me as I entered the building. My cute, new wraparound skirt somehow got one of the ties entangled in my purse strap, and it came untied and dropped as I climbed the stairs in front of the Big Brass. He got quite an eyeful of my purple panties as I tried to grab the skirt and salvage some dignity.
Now I make sure to safety pin those wraparounds.
300 people in a conference room. The speaker, who holds power over us all, is interpreting a policy. This policy interpretation means that I will now have to drive 260 miles round-trip to attend a 15 minute weekly meeting. On bad roads, in the winter, at 30 below. If I pick up a phone, I can get the skinny on the meeting and give my approval/non-approval to any decisions. But no, the policy is that I have to be there in person.
I’m not going to stand for it and will openly violate the policy. I can’t get fired for doing so. I stand up, and in my deepest, strongest voice, start to declare my freedom and intentions to all 300 people in the room, and particularly to the speaker. But I"m so upset that about 1 sentence in, I start to stammer, something I rarely do. This in turn makes me even angrier, so that in frustation and in an attempt to clear my head/tongue I say, “F!@#”. Out loud. In a voice that makes a waitress drop a tray of dishes in the back of the room.
I managed to finish my statement. No one spoke to me at break or said anything about it afterwords. Most of them looked at me like scared deer looking at a mountain lion.
I never followed the policy and never got in trouble.
I was still a student, and I had got this job at the most prominent research hospital in my country. I had just started working with my first research project. After a few weeks, I got invited to a research meeting with all the countrys’ leading scientists in my field. The meeting was not for students, but my supervisor promised he would bring me as a personal guest. I was so excited! My first real contact with the world of science! And an opportunity to meet all those people I’d only heard and read about!
The meeting started with an informal lunch. A kind of typical long, narrow sandwich was served on an oval plate. Most of the sandwich consisted of the infamous national dish bethroot-sallad. It’s made of cubed bethroots and mayonaisse, very red and very fatty. I don’t like the stuff, so I put it away in one end of my plate.
The lunch presentation was held by the professor who was chairman for meeting. It was extremely interesting, and I was totally absorbed. Indeed, I was so absorbed I didn’t notice my plate had slided out to the very edge of the table. When I pushed my knife to cut through the thick sandwich, that part of the plate was hanging in the air, and somehow, I managed to make a ballista out of it. The bethroot sallad flew away in a nice ballistic curve, landing with a splash at the table inches from the professor. Of course he had a white shirt. The room went totally silent. I wanted to vaporise, but there was no escape, my plate had fallen to the floor so it was obvious who was the assaulter. The chairman looked at the heap of bethroot sallad with a peculiar expression, then at me. Then he said: “well, after this little attack, I’d like to continue with…”
The good thing was that everybody recognised me after this! 
Ouch! I got trapped behind a revolving file shelf (long story) but I wasn’t there for more than a few minutes. Funny thing is, the woman who let me out was the one most people didn’t get along with. I’d never snapped back at her, as most people did, and she was very gracious and didn’t make fun of me afterwards. Though I told everyone anyway because I thought it was funny.
Now, my story. I was rushing to get ready in the morning, and had to use a…feminine product. At the last minute, I realized I hadn’t put it in properly, and changed it. All systems go, I thought, and headed off to work.
“What’s that?” cow-orker asked, pointing to my hand.
“Hot chocolate,” I mumbled, scurrying off to the powder room to wash the grimed-in menstrual by-product from my left thumb and forefinger.
And I sure would like to hear bluesman’s story!
Well, we had a new person working with us, and after the training period, he would be certified to be responsible for the shift (usually 2 people on shift, both knowing how to do anything that can pop up).
Anyway, after he had been certified, I noticed he had been making STUPID mistakes that made us look bad to our customers. Mentioned it to another co-worker, and we fired off an email to our supervisor explaining the situation, and why we couldn’t let it continue (it was a pretty scathing email). So our supervisor replied to us, and he CC’ed the co-worker who was the source of the problem. Problem was, supervisor also had the original email that we sent.
/crawl under rock
This was about a year and a half ago, and I get along pretty well with this co-worker now.
Vis
P.S. Bluesman, you can’t just put out a feeler like that, without ever intending to go through with the whole story. Spill it!
Oh, I forgot about the time when I was working third shift at the hospital (in the pharmacy).
I was delivering meds up to the women’s unit, where all the post-delivery moms stay. Imagine how dog tired these women are! It’s 4am, and I deliver the meds. I was really tired that night, and when I got into the elevator (right by the rooms), I hit the basement button.
Only it wasn’t the basement button, it was the emergency button. A piercing siren sounded, and I couldn’t make it stop. It stopped on it’s own an agonized 60 seconds later, and I had to get off the elevator and walk down the stairs. Apparently hitting the emergency switch disabled the elevator until someone adjusted it with a key or some such.
The nurses glared at me like you would not believe, and I felt awful for those poor women who probably thought the world was coming to an end!
Zette
I was assigned to oversee the activities of an outside contractor who had been brought into our building to do some mechanical work. I was addressing him by the name on a patch over the pocket on his coveralls all day. It finally dawned on me that his name wasn’t Otis, he was the Otis elevator repairman. Doh!
etc.