Mortification
One of the sites I read daily is Ask a Manager, a workplace advice column. Every year the site celebrates Mortification Week which is filled with stories people have sent in of embarassing situations that happened at work.
Some are as simple as flubbing a word and saying something you absolutely did not mean to say
On Slack I asked a coworker to join me in a “cuddle” instead of a “huddle.” - the marriage coupon, the peer feedback form, and other stories to cringe over
Some are experiences involving young coworkers just starting out in the workplace and clearly still finding their way around workplace norms:
We had an intern with the following quote in his signature, in the font Impact: “We Be Ballin’. Don’t Let Nobody Tell You Otherwise!” Immediately following this, he attributed the quote to himself and added a year. The year was the year he was born. - the poodle in a stroller, the music file, and other email signatures gone wild
And some are just epic and will get repeated in following years for those who might have missed it the first time:
Jane the Legend
I was working as an assistant to Jane, a woman who hit the “little old lady” stereotype even though she was in her forties. She wore a lot of cardigans she knitted herself, and she quilted blankets for everyone who had a baby. She had quaint turns of phrase like, “Thank you kindly,” which she even used in her email signature. She had a range of cat statues on her desk. That kind of thing.
We had two newer employees who were both in their mid-20s, call them Frank and Hank, and they thought it would be hysterical to substitute words in a report they were writing for Jane with similar-sounding words that were slang terms for sex acts. They assumed this sweet, innocent woman would never notice, and since she was the only one who would read it, no harm done.
Jane got the document and called them in 10 minutes later. I sat at my desk and listened while she grilled them about their “unusual word choices” until they broke down and admitted they had maybe used some slang terms they shouldn’t have. As a joke. Then she made them define each one. I could hear the absolute mortification in their voices as they struggled through explanations of terms I myself didn’t know, telling a woman they thought of as sweet and innocent all about these sexual terms.
Then came the one where Hank defined it and Jane said, “No, that’s not what it means” and provided a very detailed and technical explanation using proper medical terminology. Dead silence from Frank and Hank. Jane said, “Pranks like these make you look incompetent. Using words you don’t understand makes you look like fools. And making assumptions about your coworkers’ personal lives makes you look ignorant. Now you’re going to spend the next six months trying to prove to me that you’re none of those things, and it seems like that will be quite a challenge for you.”
Frank and Hank played no more pranks for the rest of the time I worked there. - the Latin dictionary, the misunderstood compliment, and other stories to cringe over (including an absolute hero at the end)
I love reading these, not out of schadenfreude but out of a sense of camaraderie. I feel like I LIVE mortifying events. It's probably just my social anxiety making everything seem magnified but I feel like it happens to me a lot. At least now that I'm older I find I can brush it off when these things happen and say, "Well, that's just me being me!"
The most mortifying event I can think of that ever happened to me was when I was 15. You know how you have all the feelings when you're a teenager - that's probably why this was so awful in my memory. I had a crush on someone in high school and one of the clubs I was in was having a party at his house. I was already nervous and on edge because of the social anxiety. Being in the house of someone I was crushing hard on was not helping my emotional state. Not doing "social" very well, I was feeling very fish out of water and at a loss when I spied ... A KITTY curled up under a table. Oh, I have always been such a cat lover and what better to soothe my nerves than petting a sweet soft cat? People, I bent down, cooing sweet nothings to the kitty, reached out to pet it ... and discovered it was actually a stone statue. I almost DIED.
That's where my memory of this event ends, with the feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach at the realization of what I had just done. I'm pretty sure no one saw because teenagers can be real assholes and I think that story would have spread around school and it never came up. In retrospect, it was a nothing-burger of an event. But it wasn't when I was 15 and I think the reason this sticks in my mind so much is because of the very strong emotions associated with it.
What about you? Any mortifying events you'd like to share?
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