It’s time for another edition of Awkward Moments With Goldfish, the series that, unfortunately, keeps giving.
The Erroneous “Shit!”
On Halloween, I was over at a friend’s house passing out candy. My dog was with me. We were sitting on the steps of my friend’s front porch and my dog was behind me on a leash. She handled the festivities fine until a dog dressed as a shark came along. The shark lunged at my dog and she tried to lunge back. She didn’t get very far because she was behind me on a leash.
However, in the lunging process, my dog knocked my drink over and scared the wits out of me, whereupon, I dropped the bowl of candy I was holding like the world’s laziest piñata and inadvertently shouted “SHIT!” in front of half a dozen children. Happy Halloween!
The Meeting Joke
There’s apparently a monthly production meeting at my company. I say apparently because I’ve been at my job three months now and the other day was the first “monthly” meeting I’ve attended.
Even though there were eight people in attendance, the meeting was originally supposed to be in the office manager’s office, which has only four chairs, not including hers, so five chairs. Someone suggested that, since we had a conference worth of people, we should move to the conference room where there are more chairs, so that’s what we did.
The rest of us were already seated in the conference room when the office manager came in a minute later. She pulled the last available chair from the corner and complained that it was missing a wheel. I said, “Well, that’s what you get for showing up late to your own meeting.” Everyone laughed while the office manager gave what I took as an awkward smile. I should really keep my mouth shut.
It wasn’t that funny.
The first day of daylight saving time, as usual, I had a no good, terrible, very bad day and was in a foul mood. Whether I gain an hour or lose an hour, it screws up my paltry sleep patterns. It takes me two weeks to adjust to it.
People in Los Angeles drive like idiots when anything changes. There’s a curve in the road… Drive either 2 miles or 200 miles an hour to compensate! It’s raining… Well, I better just drive into this tree/house/convenience store now to save time. It’s dark outside… OMG! STOP! If it’s dark outside and there’s water falling from the sky, you can just forget about moving anywhere at all.
It took me an extra fifteen minutes to get home because it was dark outside, and on the way to the dog park, I was behind a semi-truck with a driver who had his thumb entirely jammed up his behind. It took five minutes of my life just for him to pull over to the side of the road and get the hell out of my way.
When I finally got to the dog park that night, I was, to put it delicately, pissy. I said to the regulars, “It’s National Be In My Way Day and everybody’s celebratin’!” The “everybody” was said like Chingy says it in the song Everybody in the club gettin’ tipsy–more of a suggestion of syllables than actually pronouncing them. And I threw up some half-hearted jazz hands when I said the word “celebratin’.”
I did not think this through. It was not material I practiced at home. It was something I said spur of the moment in a pissy mood. One of the dog park regulars thought it was the absolute funniest thing he’d ever seen/heard. He kept bringing it up again for the entire time I was there and even mentioned it again the next time I saw him. I found it incredibly awkward. I asked, “It was the jazz hands, wasn’t it?” He said it was just my whole delivery.
The Drought Car Wash
In Los Angeles, we have two kinds of rain: the kind that makes your car cleaner and the kind that makes it dirtier. We recently had the dirtier kind as I pulled my dirty car up to work one morning. One of my coworkers asked me if I was purposely not washing my car because of the persistent drought in California. She explained, “I’m not washing my car because of the drought. Not washing your car to show support for water conservation is ‘in’ now.” I said, “Well, I’ve always been ‘in’ then, since having a clean car has never been very high on my to-do list. As long I can mostly see out the windows, that’s clean enough.”
The following week, I saw her giving her keys to the guys who come to our office to wash cars. I said, “I thought you were not washing your car because of the drought?” She stammered, “Well, I was, but my neighbor… I mean, well, I made a $20,000 investment in that car and I’ve got to take care of it.” Uh huh.
The Awkward CC
I sent a text message to my sister and Male at the same time. Male and I had a text conversation without realizing that my sister was still getting CC’d on it. We chatted back and forth for about twenty minutes before my sister chimed in with “I CAN SEE THIS!” Fortunately, we weren’t talking about anything too naughty I don’t think. Gulp.
Banana Hammock Day
It’s not every day that you run into someone at work wearing only a black banana hammock and black socks, not even where I work. I work for a company that owns a lot of little companies with niche product lines, including my own. One of the product lines is fancy lingerie. Every once in a while, they do a photo shoot, which means auditioning models.
Then, the next week, we had this…
In a move that seems sadly typical of the company I work for, they didn’t tell anyone that that’s what they were doing, so suddenly there were tanned, tall and muscular people walking around in their skivvies in my office. While I didn’t find it all that strange considering the company I work for, it is more awkward than you’d imagine walking into the bathroom at your workplace to find busty models trying on bras. You think you’re prepared for that until it happens.
Fish Of Gold 