Mr. Saucy Pants

I walked around the corner surprised to see a table full of my coworkers. It was lunchtime, so the fact that people were gathering wasn’t out of the ordinary, but I’d never seen this many people at the same table before. Then I noticed my boss sitting in the middle of the group.

“Alex, you’re up,” he said expectantly, and all of my coworker’s faces turned to look at me.

“For what?” I politely asked, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“We all just went around the table telling our most embarrassing stories,” he continued. “And now it’s your turn.” My eyes narrowed, and I looked around the table like we were in the middle of a high-stakes poker game, trying to spot a liar.

“No way. What was your story then?” I feigned confidence.

“No,” he calmly stated. “We already went, and you were late. Now it’s your turn.” When it’s your boss, you don’t have the luxury of telling an asshole to fuck off, unfortunately, and I found myself bullied into a corner. His whole premise was probably a total lie. At best, it was dumb icebreaker that my middle-aged boss proposed to the table full of recent college grads. The odds that everyone had shared their own stories was terrible, but I was new at the company and hadn’t yet clicked with any coworkers, so I took the chance to try to win them over with my story. Up until this point, I had always tried to suppress my creative, artsy side while at work. But as soon as I started telling my story, I couldn’t help but energetically animate it the way the story required. With the spotlight on me in front of a sitting audience, I began what was “My Most Embarrassing Moment”…

“One day in college I was in the cafeteria and I had amassed a huge tray of food. I mean, I had plates stacked on top of plates, little plates higher up, and a bowl and… you get it. Pasta with sauce, a massive double cheeseburger, a big salad, a bowl of soup, a slice of cake.. In all honesty, I was pretty stoned at the time. Ok? There. Truth. So I’m sliding my tray down the rails- you know how they have the track for you to slide your tray- and I get to the end where the condiments are stored in bins with squeeze tops. I take the bun off of the top of my burger, and squeeze some ketchup and mustard onto it. I then place it back down on the burger but as I mentioned: this wasn’t just any burger. I had made a monster double-burger with ALL of the fixings piled HIGH. Yes, high, ha ha. So when I put the bun back on top, I really had to squash it down to make sure it wouldn’t fall over like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, you know? HOWEVER! I hadn't noticed that my tray had partially slid off the rails… So when I pushed down on the burger, the whole tray flipped towards me, catapulting all of the tray's food onto my crotch and legs. Plates broke, and sauce went everywhere, starting from my stomach, down my legs, over my shoes, and pooled around me on the floor. Mind you, this was in the middle of lunch at a major university, so the place was packed. The entire cafeteria heard my catastrophe and turned to laugh. I even saw one of my friends in the crowd staring at my predicament. I was mortified. There was enough hot marinara and soup soaked through my pants that it felt like I was standing in a hot tub. With uproarious laughter coming from all around, I squatted down to pick up pieces from the broken plates. A kitchen aid came over and knelt next to me, telling me to go home and that she would take care of it. I tried to say I could help, but she insisted and repeated that I go home to change. So I did. I trudged out of the cafeteria, my socks and shoes now fully soaked and probably delicious, and walked about ten blocks through downtown Boston to get home. And that was one of the most embarrassing days of my life.”

All of my coworkers around the table were snickering as I finished my story. But somehow it didn’t feel like they were laughing at the actual story.

“Thank you for that,” my boss said with a smirk. “Alex, we didn’t actually tell embarrassing stories. You just fell for it.” Now, everyone laughed freely. My face dropped. I looked around the table at my coworkers, hating every single one of them, especially my boss. That was over ten years ago, and I still often daydream about how I should’ve exploded on him instead of merely standing there while the moment passed. Spilling a massive tray of food on myself was embarrassing. Being gullible enough to tell that story in front of my boss and coworkers was mortifying. But allowing myself to be used and made fun of by someone in a position of power without setting them straight is the only thing I would change if I could go back.