What is the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you?

That’s not embarrassing, that’s foreshadowing.

Trust me, it was also unbelievably embarrassing!
Needless to say, after the first round of laughter died down, my husband’s comment brought on the second wave. I was so flustered that when class was over, I picked up my pillow and headed for the door. Since I was carrying it out in front of my pregnant self, I did not see the trash can ahead and crashed headlong into it, causing it to loudly crash to the floor. I never wanted to go back. Sometime later, I somehow managed to give birth without any major mishaps.

When I was in labor with my first child, I had pre-eclampsia and/or kidney disease and was in very bad shape. The doctor would not allow me out of bed after a certain point, and I desperately needed to pee. So, in the presence of my husband, my best friend, the doc and several nurses, I had to pee in the labor bed…and everyone knew it. I also dropped a full cup of sprite while in the midst of a contraction, so for the rest of my labor, everyone got ‘stuck’ to the floor as they walked around. Each step was accompanied by a sort of slurping sound. It was pretty surreal.

I have learned not to get embarassed. I am terribly clumsy and I say all the wrong things, so I tend to do many embarassing things.

Here is a recent story that made me blush… No judgment guys.

I work at a police department and I see an assortment of people come in and out. One day officers brought a man to the police department to process him. (I think the jail was really busy that day or something…Not the point.) Anyway, I saw the guy come in with the cop and he was a big time druggie. His hair was disgusting, what teeth he had left were black, scars all over his face…Ugh I could go on. Anyway, the officer goes into his area then calls me on the phone for some information on the guy. Me being the nice person that I am decided to make the comment of “He’s a funny lookin’ guy.” I then hear “Well thank you.” The voice was not the officers. I was on speakerphone and the guy heard my not-so-nice remark. I tried to cover and say I was talking about someone in the room…. Yeah, didn’t work. Good thing the guy was too messed up to really care. I was a little scared though.

When I was in the 8th grade, I had to take shop…I’m not the kind of guy who does well in shop, but I also generally got great grades in everything else without much effort. So, not passing a class was out of the question, but I felt like I wasn’t going to pass shop…unlike gym where the teacher would give me a better grade for trying (and failing) than he’d give to the kid who succeeded at everything (without effort), this guy was old school, an ex marine, with the crew cut and everything, and he meant business. He had very strict, arcane rules and he made no exceptions, and he graded our work based on merit, not on effort.

I had strep throat once that year and had to miss a couple days of school, and the day I got back, the teacher said we were going to have a test on the material that I missed the next class period. We didn’t have a text book, everything we were supposed to know was covered in the lecture. So I asked him if there was any way I could find out the content of that lecture, because I really wanted to learn the material. No dice. He said it was up to me to find someone who took notes (good luck finding an 8th grade boy who took notes in shop class!). No matter how I begged, reasoned or what not with him, he didn’t care if I failed the test, he didn’t care how I found out about the material, he was going to do what.

So after doing the best I could, a couple weeks later, I really had to cut a whiz, right in the middle of his class. Now one of the things he told us going into the class on the first day was, you are welcome to excuse yourself during the class period to go to the bathroom or for any reason, but when you are gone, I will make sure to give out some information that I will test on later, so you miss it at your own peril. Knowing what an asshole this guy was from experience, I knew that if I excused myself to pee, he’d take this as yet another opportunity to give me a failing grade. So, I tried to hold it. And I JUST ABOUT made it. And once it started, there was no stopping it.

My parents both worked 10 miles away from the school, and we lived 4 miles out of town in a different direction, so I just dried off by getting friendly with the radiator and went about my day trying to hide my shame, but knowing that everyone knew.

@dale- You’re only cool if you pee in your pants.

Oh, you poor stinky boy.

Oh, dale. I feel for you, I really do.

@daleIt is truly disturbing that there were/are? teachers like that in the educational system.

Years ago I had a job where I delivered magazines to waiting rooms. This was in late August and I have bad allergies so I was constantly blowing my nose. One day I was in my vehicle preparing to make a delivery and sneezed a tremendous sneeze. I blew my nose and thought nothing of it. I went into the waiting room and went about filling my racks. I would nod and say hello to waiting patients and the nurses and staff. Little smiles, short conversations. I get back to my car and pull down the mirror to check m,y make-up and I find out that I have this huge greeny gross booger right next to my nose! Oh dear god, I was mortified. It was so big no one could not have noticed. To this day I get a sick feeling in my stomach when I think of that day. I never went back to that office….

So I’m at an outside walk up at lunch. Had a sandwich and a chocolate chip cookie (natch).

Drinking a water when this beautiful girl comes up to me. “Hey”, she says in hushed, sultry tones. “How was lunch?”

“G-g-g-ood”, says I.

“So…you like chocolate?” she whispers as she produces a napkin and procedes to wipe a glob of melted chocolate chip from my chin. Then…she giggles and practically skips away.

Mortified.

Yes, re teachers when I went to school, it’s amazing what they could get away with. My first grade teacher resented me from day one because I had gone to kindergarten elsewhere and aparently there was some snafu so that I was not on any of the 3 teachers’ lists when I got to my first day of first grade. So after going to each teacher and asking if I could be in their class (and being refused 3 times), I went to the principal’s office, and he put me in the class of the first teacher I’d visited. From that day on, every single day she found and excuse to send me to the coat room…I’d have to sit in the room where everyone hung their coats for like 1/2 an hour, and usually I didn’t even know what it was that I was supposed to have done. One time someone threw a paper airplane at me…I had not yet learned to make a paper airplane so I couldn’t have been the culprit, yet I got blamed for it and sent to the coat room.

Then there was my 4th grade teacher who showed Charlotte’s Web to the class while I was out sick one day. The next day he asked us to turn in some homework, which I didn’t know about, so he calls me in front of the class and calls me lazy, starts calling me “Wilbur” (I didn’t get the reference) and brings me to another room to open hand spank me. Of course, this guy was a perv, he was sexually assaulting the other 4th grade teacher after school every day.

I also happened to be the last person on the bus, which was full by the time I got there, and there was never a seat for me, or because I became somewhat of the school whipping boy in my early days (I was smart, overweight, the new kid, and the brunt of abuse from my teacher…not a good combination), room could have at times been made, but never was, so I would be the only passenger standing on the 4 mile trip to school. All well and good, but my overbearing mother caught wind of it and had the police pull the school bus over, which somehow every kid but me knew was her doing, which made me all the less popular, not just with the kids, but with the bus driver.

The principal was also no fan of mine as kids would try to pick fights with me, and of course I’d just be trying to mind my own damn business, but in the “it takes two to tango” department, as soon as someone would see an altercation, I’d be dragged to the principal’s office, and of course I was labeled the troublemaker. I was getting shit from EVERYONE.

So the kids, I understand that, but it alarms me how screwed up a person can be and still be in a position to weild authority over kids. Where I went to school, incompetence and pettiness were systematic among the faculty and staff. I have to hope that this was a function of a) being in a far less enlightened time (the late 70s/early 80s) and b) being in a small, pissant northern Minnesota town. So far, my son has had nothing but wonderful teachers at his school.

Don’t cry for me though…it built character and turned me into who I am today…had I not been crushed, I probably would have been one of those overly optimistic people who gets eaten alive by the world. Can’t say it was ideal or that it couldn’t have been much better, but I look on the bright side about it. Made that 8th grade experience just another shitty day in a seemingly never ending series of shitty days at the time.

Torn frenulum during sex. Very messy.