Cindy

Droog

Read Cindy's bio and previous columns

November 26, 2007

My Hall of Shame: Exploding Microwaves, Spilled Paint and Toenail Cutting Reminders

There’s nothing like the off-site company meeting for a lot of reasons. One of the top has to be the facilitator who uses this form of torture as his favorite icebreaker: Tell us about your most embarrassing moment.

Before working in corporate America, I thought the point of embarrassing moments was that they were rare, and weren’t necessarily meant to be relived. Now I see the truth. The point of them is to find one – just one – for times like this. When you need to share something that strikes the perfect balance between harmlessly funny and completely lame.

I haven’t found my perfectly sharable story yet, and I always hope that something one of my fellow off-site meeting prisoners says will spark a memory I’ve yet to consider as my standard response.

However, they face the same conundrum. Many times, the stories involve kids. Came to work with banana all over my dress? What working mom hasn’t? Didn’t notice the spit-up in my hair until I was presenting to the client? Been there. Done that.

I think the facilitators should require that each story involve a moment so awkward that it made one thank God for all the bosses who didn’t fire us – or at least put us up for a public humiliation session – when they happened.

I share mine here so that I can refer back to them before my next off-site torture session. After all, between work and kids, I’ll be the first to admit that my memory’s not quite what it used to be. 

First, there was the toenail incident of 1995. The classic keeper of to-do-lists that I am, it never occurred to me that adding number 57 to my list – “cut toenails” – was out of the ordinary. It seemed an innocent enough, and very real, thing that I needed to accomplish.  

Until my new boss of maybe three or four days found the list. I’d left it in her office, and was bewildered when she came to me in a fit of hysterical laughter. “Cindy, you can’t remember to cut your own toenails? I think we need to take a few other things off your plate!” I fought the urge to crawl under my desk and hide. 

But hey, it gone done! That evening. At 5:12 p.m. to be exact.  

There was also the time I blew up the office microwave, and narrowly escaped burning down the entire 100-year-old, historic office building right along with it. Everybody knows you don’t put aluminum coffee cups in the microwave. Everyone except – on that day – me.  

About $99 and a trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond later, the office had a new microwave. But I still had the nickname “Firestarter,” which I explained away to clients as hailing from my striking (sort of) resemblance to an eight-year-old Drew Barrymore.  

My lack of grace when it comes to office improvement is no better. About four years ago, a former boss of mine decided that we could all paint our own offices the color of our desire. For me, it was green. But when I knocked over the entire gallon of “garden mist” onto the office carpet, the landlord didn’t buy my excuse that I was going for the complete botanical look, including groundcover.  

That boss paid for our carpet cleaning, forgave and forgot, and we’re still friends today. The building landlord, however? I probably can’t put his nickname for me in writing. It might offend.  

I figure three good stories to choose from should be enough for anyone with a career spanning 15 years. I can rotate between them for awhile, and eventually, when everyone I work with has heard all of them, I can always fall back to the time I drove a client’s vehicle, being debuted at a press conference, straight into a door.  

I’ll have to save that story for a full-on, multi-day corporate retreat. After all, it was more humiliating than spit-up, bananas, green paint and flaming electrical outlets combined!

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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