Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Colossal Blunder

I don't know if I have the courage to tell you about every fax pas I've committed in my lifetime, so far, but I have to tell you what happened to me yesterday.

A friend of mine—I'll call him Oniondude—from the last company I worked at likes to send me links from The Onion, which many of you know about already. I don't find it particularly funny most of the time. Satire has to be done with just the right touch and I don't often appreciate what I read there. It's sort of ironic because I can laugh from the start of Top Secret to the end (especially the exploding Pinto scene).

Earlier in the day, I had been working on a tough issue at work, and the newest addition to our software development team—I'll call her Mary—happens to have had some experience in the arena I was investigating, and she sent me her notes on how to set up my software tools to do what I needed them to do. It worked wonderfully, and I would have been sunk without her. So at 5:30PM, after finally getting everything up and running, I wrote an instant message to her, "It works! Wahoooo!"

No reply. I was thinking it was after five and she had gone home.

Twenty minutes later Oniondude sends me an Onion link entitled: Houston Rockets Catch Tracy McGrady Masturbating To Tape Of His 41-Point Performance. I didn't bother to read it and was going to ignore it, but he wrote me back:

"that is great!"

Ok, he wanted a reaction. I typed, "I would masturbate to my own perfomance too. Not sure how long it would take to wear off."

A minute later: "did you mean to send that to me? i'm not getting it. sorry"

Huh?

I looked at the IM screen. It was Mary who had replied, our previous conversation having overlaid the one I was having with Oniondude.

I felt a thousand sizzling hot prickles on my face.

"Oh, my, goodness—I am sooo sorry. It was replying to a friend about an Onion article."

"don't worry. no prob :) just making sure it wasn't some new fangled programming joke"

"I'm glad you have a sense of humor… I would never do that out of the blue. That's going down in my history of big whopping blunders, and the list is pretty long already."

"definitely. i like have a laugh. well, if you don't have a list of blunders you may not be living life fully :)"

Can you imagine what could have happened if she weren't so cool? My GOD! My legs were shaking after the adrenaline wore off. I thought I was going to get fired for sure.

So, does anyone care to share a similar story? Feel free to post about it and put a link in the comments.


 

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

God, Scott, in that case I'm not living, lol!! That's a good one! A beetroot moment!

mr. schprock said...

Well, the closest I can come to that was during a time when a certain saleswoman kept calling and calling me. One day the intern answered the phone and told me it was her again. I vented by saying, "My God! She won't stop calling! What a haunt! Tell her I'm not here."

When the intern returned to the phone to tell her, she had already hung up.

Several weeks later I needed this same saleswoman for something and I instructed the intern to call her and put in an order. After speaking to her very briefly, he informed me he had been completely rebuffed. Why? Because the last time this person had called and I went off on my rant, the moron intern didn't put her on hold!

Anonymous said...

How funny! How cool she had such a good sense of humor. The threat of going blind is bad enough now you had to worry if you'd loose your job!

The Zombieslayer said...

Don't feel so bad. I've committed so many fax pas at work. Nothing along the same lines, but I'll tell you one that got me in trouble not too long ago.

I think I told you before that I used to be rail thin in HS. Used to eat 3000 calories a day. Dad used to buy me beer in HS so I could gain weight and every night, I'd drink a milkshake with a raw egg and a can of beer before going to sleep. Still, was rail thin.

Anyways, men seem to handle weight issues better than women. I just thought I'd deal with it by eating a lot. It didn't cause any emotional problems.

Well, we have a girl at work who is currently rail thin. Let's just call her Britney. I'm now pretty "normal." Britney has serious issues with her weight and hates it when people mention anything about her weight.

We were at a lunch room and everyone was talking about their weight in HS. I don't know why I did this, but I said in HS, I was so thin, I made Britney look fat. Immediately after saying that, I knew major fax pas. Really bad move on my part. I could see her literally holding back a tear and felt like I was the world's biggest a-hole.

Man, that was stupid. But it happens. I of course apologized to Britney and she said it was nothing but I could tell it wasn't nothing. She was holding back tears, and everyone there could tell.

Beth said...

Oh my gosh, that is HYSTERICAL!!! One time my mother was talking to me on the phone and my sister called, she told me to hang on, pressed the FLASH button, told my sister she was talking to me, and that she'd call her back, then pushed FLASH again, and said, "Oh God, Beth, it was just your sister ... she's such a bitch, she gets angry because I can't talk to her right then, but I'm talking to you and I don't even care. Who cares, right? Beth? Beth???" This is when my sister says, "Well, now I know what you think of me, BITCH!" When my mother got back on the phone with me, she was soooo shaken. And she learned a lesson to boot.

Beth said...

Wow, I really love Schprock's "what a haunt." He was born in the wrong era.

Hoodie said...

I'm pretty sure I can tell you that I don't have a story that can match. Yikes.

Hey, if you're interested in an easy way to win a free book, come check out my blog.

The Zombieslayer said...

I think Beth's story tops mine. Wow.

GutterBall said...

Dude, Top Secret rules.

And kinda on the opposite side of your little blunder, here's a good one for ya. I'm kinda known as the Cookie Lady at work, since I bake a pretty mean batch of tollhouse cookies and can usually be talked into baking them on demand. Well, one of the guys from one of our other buildings just happened to be in house on a cookie day -- he "happened" to be in as soon as he heard the news, heh -- and he snarfed up a couple on his way to his office in the back.

Much later -- later enough that I'd forgotten he was even in -- he walks by my desk, gives me a big smile and a wink, and says, "Niiiiice cookies!"

I should add here that I don't usually wear low-cut shirts, and I was wearing a low-cut shirt that day, and his eyes did cut down that way when he first walked by. Heh.

Thankfully, though the comment caught me so off-guard, I'm not dumb enough (or so quick to offense) to have not figured it out before reacting, so after a moment's stunned blinking, I grinned ear to ear and replied, "You know, you're one of the only guys I'll let pay me that kind of compliment, buddy."

He, of course, blushed to the tips of his ears, caught another quick look at the cleavage, and started sputtering. Heheh, couldn't help myself. I had to do it.

He's a good sport, so all was well, but it was lots of fun.