I’m not offended because I was too busy a) laughing, and b) sympathizing because one of my biggest fears is that I’m going to tape something important on a tape that formerly held porn and then lend it out to someone who wouldn’t be amused. 
I was at a party, quite drunk. A really hot girl had joined, and I had taken a fancy to her. When a buddy of mine asked me if I thought she was hot, I responded, “Hell yeah, I’d like to fuck her!”
Problem was that his question was quiet and my response was loud. Really loud. Embarassingly loud.
She looked over, kind of tilted her head to the side and said, “What?”
I buried my face in a pillow and passed out.
I also got the time wrong, it was in '98, so more like 6 years ago. My Og, I’m having terrible brain farts today, ever since that English Muffin thread over in CS… one light went on, and apparently a bunch of other lights went out. I must need extra sleep.
To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, if you thought there was another room why didn’t you at least try to avoid the guy you were about to walk into?
I was at a very large party where I didn’t know most of the people and I had a very sudden uterine hemmorage. One moment I’m talking to someone, next moment I’m standing in a pool of my own blood.
So many of our stories are surrounding bodily functions…
A few years ago, I stopped at my husband’s business to potty. (He owned a gas station) For some reason, my toilet paper defies physics and gets caught in my panty hose.
I walked out of the bathroom with a tail of toilet paper. Not ONE of his employees (all boys between 18 and 20) said a word to me but thought it was funny as hell. Finally, I turned around and my husband rescued me.
I was mortified.
:o
I did that, too. At a restaurant we go to all the time. I had about four feet of white paper trail. The waiter who stopped me and helped me nearly couldn’t, because he was laughing too hard.
I only thought it happened in the movies.
The rest of my stories fill me with too much trauma and shame to relate. The ones that really embarrass me aren’t so much funny as they are cringe-inspiring wish-I-were-dead moments.
Okay, got one. Sharing is cathartic, right?
I was working as a nanny/housekeeper one summer for a family with two spoiled children. A very capital-C Christian family. I’m not, but I kept my mouth shut and earned my money. I did the laundry and stuff during the day and I was putting laundry away, and yes, I was bored and was snooping, yep (this is SO embarrassing—the snooping’s the most shameful part) and found porn tapes in the husband’s clothes cupboard. Whee! Porn! I was single, horny and yep, when the kids were in their rooms for ‘quiet time’, I watched. Whee! Porn! And it was good porn, too.
Trouble is, kids are up, tape is placed in master bedroom to be put away carefully before the parents come home. But you know how it is with kids—as soon as they’re up and around, it’s frantic.
I forgot to go put the tape back where I’d found it.
I remembered that night, just as I got home, around five-thirty.
There was nothing I could do about it. It was a long night.
Had to show up the next morning, and face the husband, knowing he knew that I knew that he had porn, and that I had found it. That I had snooped and probably watched. And neither of us could say anything. He couldn’t let on that he wasn’t the perfect Mr. Christian, and I couldn’t let on that I’d snooped and watched the porn.
I would rather die than do anything like that again. It’s a cautionary tale about doing the right thing, even if it’s not because you want to be good, but because getting caught is so very, very, very embarrassing.
The toilet paper in my case was stuck to the bottom of my shoe, to clarify.
But the paper ‘tail’ I’ve had happen to a co-worker. Just recently.
This is a very large woman–300lbs or so–and she had it coming out of the back of her pants. She didn’t know it was there, and it was up to me, as the nearest colleague in our department, to tell her. I dashed to her side and hissed something like “reach around back, quick!”
She did, but being quite large, didn’t reach it. “No! No! It’s still there!” I said, but she was looking at me like I was an idiot. So I had to grab it right quick and hand it to her.
So that’s probably her most embarrassing story.
But then she put it in the recycling box at my desk, instead of the garbage.
I didn’t want that.
No worries. You both amused and edified. I’ll post my recital story later.
When I was in the fifth grade, I ran for 5th grade president. Against my twin sister, who was in the other class. The day came for all the candidates (including the nominees in all the other grades) to give speeches at Assembly. I remember spending more than a week writing and refining my speech so that it would be perfect. I even inserted jokes into it so that all the kids would laugh.
On the day of the speech, I had to go to an awards ceremony held at another school for young writers (I was a nerd). That means that for most of the day, my mind was not on my speech. I did, however, have the speech written down so that I could practice when I could. I managed to squeeze in one last practice run while my mother drove me back to school.
We arrive just as Assembly begins and I rush to take my seat with the other presidential candidates. In front of the whole school.
Oh shit! It suddenly occurs to me that I don’t have my notes! I left them in Mommy’s mini-van!
Well, maybe I can just wing it. I’ve practiced the speech enough to have it memorized. Right?
It’s my turn to stand up and talk. It’s my first Big Speech ever, and I have no notes. All these eyes are staring up at me, waiting. I have to say something…
My speech is horrible. I tried to remember what I had written but everything I say is scrambled and stupid-sounding. My jokes fall flat because I rush through them nervously. I rambled like a loon. I think I actually ended it with, “Vote for me…just because.” It was a giant nightmare. What’s worse is my mother was in the audience, watching the whole thing.
What’s more worse is that my twin sister–my opponent–then stands up and gives the most excellent speech. Why? Because she has NOTES! And she’s not sweating buckets.
Afterwards, when we returned to class, one of the boys commented to the teacher that he thought my sister’s talk was much better than mine. The teacher came to my defense and said that she was proud of me for going through with it. Ooh, I just wanted to die right there. Not surprisingly, my sister won the election.
We suffered from an entire year of her brutal tyranny until rebel forces (led by me) moved in and spurred a violent but glorious revolution.
I was five. Just into kindergarten. Beginning stages of socialization with ‘the masses’. I picked my nose while the rest of the class was looking at me for some reason, and one of the other kids noted it, rather loudly, which caused the rest of the class to laugh at me.
I’d like to think this was a ‘small thing’, but the fact that I can remember it clear as day 28 years later, even down to what kids were wearing and the name of the kid that ‘noticed’ and had to alert the others…
Well, when people ask me why I pursue and favor visual art over music, I tell them this little gem: Fifth grade was when a child could learn to play an instrument in the elementarty schools and I chose to take lessons with a trumpet. At the end of the year the band of elementary school students put on an all city concert, which was the time for all the parents to see their children perform.
So the band teacher (who I hated, but that really doesn’t have much to do with the story) is talking and taking a very loooong time. I’m sitting there. Bored. I get to looking at the instrument sitting in my lap and in one of those “hey, I wonder if I could stick my finger through this hole/head between these rails/touch the spinning saw blade without getting hurt” moments/ I stick my elbow between some of the tubes of the trumpet.
Of course, it’s now stuck, and I have to have the band teacher stop conducting and come help me wrench it off of my arm. Keep in mind that this is in front of almost everyone in my grade, as well as their parents, everyone was laughing hysterically. My own parents, however, weren’t so amused. I quit shortly after, but I wasn’t very good anyway.