Anecdote of the Day: Embarrassing Moments

Back at my old job--which was a hotbed of corporate sleaze, which is why it's not my current job--our manager really liked to take time off for team building exercises. She loved this stuff. She'd take the whole department to a hotel on Friday night and make us spend Saturday learning about each other, somehow not understanding that we all had Very Important Things to be doing back home, such as (in my case) napping and hubby-schnuggling and experimenting with quiche. We'd all have to sit in a circle and talk about our favorite books, or which album we'd want to have on a desert island, or who we had a crush on in middle school. And by the end of the weekend, inevitably, we'd all be in bad moods and not especially eager to see each other again on Monday.

Boss Lady especially loved to have us share our most embarrassing moments. I hate this question. The really embarrassing moments are ones that I've spent a great deal of time and energy trying to purge from my memory, and I don't particularly care to share or relive them. So I dredged up a middle school memory, because they're far enough back to be funny.

 

 I talked about how my best friend's thirteenth birthday party and my first period managed to coincide. Which would have been fine and dandy if it hadn't been a pool party. I had absolutely no idea what to do. I tried to beg off swimming for a while, but the sun was hot and the water looked wonderful and heck, how bad could it be? So I put one of those massive maxi pads in the bottom of my swimsuit and cannonballed into the water.

This, as it turned out, was a mistake. The pad absorbed more water than should have been possible according to the laws of physics, and when I climbed out of the pool I looked like I had a diaper between my legs. My friend's mother took me aside and told me all about tampons, and it was horrible, just horrible. I'd never blushed so hard.

Until today.

Today I was sitting at my computer, oh-so-innocently, when one of the VPs came in to discuss a project we're working on. This particular VP is a dear, grandfatherly soul, all jowly and squishy and bifocal-y. He was looking over my shoulder at a spreadsheet when an email from my husband popped up on the screen. It read:

Hey Lady,

I can't stop thinking about how amazing you were last night...

The VP spluttered. He coughed. He went bug-eyed behind the bifocals. I ahemed and blushed and sat up a little straighter and tried really really hard not to giggle. "Well!" said the VP. "Well!"

"Well!" I agreed. "So, the totals for the next quarter..."

"Yes, yes, the totals," he said, and we both tried very hard to forget about it. But he kept blushing and I kept blushing and finally he gave up and went away. At which point I disabled the pop-up email notifications.

But I'm going to stick with the maxi pad story next time someone asks. Maybe--please, Lord--I'll be able to forget the look of spluttery astonishment on the VP's face, and the appalled look he gave me over his glasses. Maybe.