Life is full of awkward moments. I seem to have more than average. Here are a few.

He likes perfume.

We had a Secret Santa gift exchange at work. I’ve only worked at my job for five months and I’m not the friendliest person around, so I know less than half of my coworker’s names. The half that I know either have name plates at their desks, I’ve had to interact with them in a businessy way or I used to work with them at the job I had before this one. The company that bought my company a few months ago also bought the company I worked for before that, so there are a lot of former coworkers.

For the Secret Santa, I was worried that I’d pull the name of someone I didn’t know at all, and I’d have to ask who they were and where they sat like the social idiot that I am. I was relieved to see that I pulled the name of a guy from my old company, so at least I knew who he was. In the next instant, I realized I had absolutely no idea what to get him.

I asked another old coworker who works very closely with my Secret Santa pick what to get him and he told me, “He likes perfume.”

Blink blink. “What?”

“You know, perfume.”

“I’m not buying him perfume.”

“Oh, right, I forget that ‘perfume’ in English is for women. In Spanish, it’s the same word for men and women. I mean cologne.”

“Ooooh. Well, I’m not buying him cologne.”

Even though I’ve known my Secret Santa recipient for nigh on a decade, I don’t know him that well or that way. To me, cologne/perfume is a pretty intimate sort of gift. I got him a Starbucks gift card instead since I often see him coming back from lunch with a Starbucks cup.

Thanks for the secret gift.

When I got the Starbucks card, they were out of gift envelopes, so they gave me a small cup to put it in. I wrote his name on it and put a big bow on top, so it looked something like this cup in the middle with an even bigger bow:

On Secret Santa gift exchange day, I was trying to find a way to get my Starbucks gift card on my recipient’s desk without him knowing. Unfortunately, he works on the other side of the building so I couldn’t just wait for him to pee or whatever. It had to be planned out. I couldn’t exactly walk through the warehouse with a not very covert cup with a big bow on it without someone cluing in. If I ran into him, I’d be caught.

Right before lunch, I asked one of the guys who works in the warehouse to covertly put it on my Secret Santa recipient’s desk while he was at lunch.

Not even five minutes later, before lunch, my Secret Santa recipient came over and thanked me for the gift card. The guy in the warehouse had walked directly to my Secret Santa’s desk, given him the cup and told him it was from me.

I asked the warehouse guy later why he did that. “I was perfectly capable of walking back there and handing him a cup myself. The whole point of having you do it was so that he didn’t know who it was from. Do you not understand the ‘secret’ part of Secret Santa?

“I did wonder why you’d ask me to do that. I just figured it was because I was going there anyway…”

Derp.

Driveway Asshole

One night, I came home to find my driveway half-blocked by a Range Rover. I could see there was someone sitting in the car, so I flashed my high beam headlights at him a few times, because I absolutely hate horn honking in residential neighborhoods unless it’s life or death.

There was no response, so I backed up, straightened myself out some and hopped the curb to get into my own driveway. On the way by, I muttered “asshole,” because this guy was clearly an asshole. I didn’t think he could hear me. I was wrong.

I pulled into my garage and was about to walk into my house when all of a sudden someone asked, “Why’d you call me an asshole?” I turned around to find a Range Rover containing two bigger than average guys. My heart leaped into my throat, but I forced it back down.

I can deal with encounters like this in public (for whatever reason, they seem to happen a lot), but this was not in public. I was standing in my garage. Instead of blocking my driveway, this guy and his friend and his Range Rover were now blocking my garage. I had no escape route and they know were I live. As I often do when faced with a crisis, I got angry. I find anger to be my go-to emotion. It gets shit done. It’s not always the best emotion in a crisis since sometimes it can escalate things.

“You were blocking my driveway.”

“You could have honked.”

“I flashed my brights at you several times and got not response.”

“You should have honked. There’s no reason to call me an asshole, bitch.”

“There’s no reason to call me a bitch, asshole!” and with that, I flipped him the middle finger and shut my garage door.

I was worried that the next morning, I’d find BITCH scrawled across my garage door or something, but thankfully, I’ve never seen driveway asshole again.

I may have texted my mom about a blowjob

Male and I had this conversation:

Perfectly normal snark, right? Well, it’s not the conversation that’s the problem so much. It’s that the first green word bubble there about personal blowjob assistants originally went to my mom.

You see, it was the same day that my parents were flying in to visit, so I was texting Male and my mom at the same time. I presume what happened was that I read Male’s message, did something else on my phone and came back in to the conversation with my mom instead. Whoopsies!

Always look at the text recipient before hitting send, people. Important.