It’s Mortification Week at Ask a Manager and all week long we’ll be revisiting ways we’ve mortified ourselves at work. Here are 15 more mortifying stories to enjoy.
1. The zipper
Last year I had to give a very important presentation in front of very important customers, part of a week-long roadshow. I had packed several dresses and one suit. Unfortunately, I hadn’t worn this particular suit for a while, and I didn’t think to try it on before the trip. I did remember there was some reason I hadn’t worn the suit lately, but I saw there was a missing button on the pants and figured that was it. I safety pinned it together and called it good.
Cut to the meeting. We arrive early. The customers aren’t here yet. It’s a small room, with a large table taking up most of the space, regular rolling office-type chairs at the table itself, and a number of smaller non-rolling chairs around the edge. My boss and another coworker are standing and talking. I’ve been on my feet the entire week and am in general exhausted, so I sit down in one of the rolling office chairs. The back immediately tilts ALL the way back. The safety pin holds just fine – but I hear the telltale sound of my zipper sliding down. Instant mortification, of course, but my coworkers don’t seem to have noticed, so I sit up, use the edge of the table to hide what was going on, and quietly zip it back up.
All good? Not so much. There’s clearly something wrong with the zipper, because almost immediately I feel it start to slide down again. Maybe it’s the way I’m sitting in this chair? I can’t get it to stop tilting back. I stand up, turn around, zip my zipper up again, and hide this by swapping the offending rolling chair for one of the non-rolling chairs at the edge of the room. I’m holding back hysterical laughter at this point. My coworker is throwing me weird looks– she knows something is going on, but not what. She doesn’t say anything, though, first because she’s a great coworker, and also because the customers are starting to filter in.
Standing up seems to have helped, maybe something about the angle – the zipper is holding fine. I greet the customers, shake hands and introduce myself, and then sit down to start the presentation. The non-rolling chair is better, I can sit up straighter. Still fine, still fine, still fine … and then two minutes in, the zipper starts sliding down again, tooth by tooth.
There’s nothing I can do at this point. I shift closer to the table, discreetly tug my shirt down over my pants, and give the rest of the presentation with my zipper completely down.
(No one noticed. I cried hysterical tears of laughter in the bathroom afterwards.)
2. The Star Trek episode
At the orientation during my very first grown-up job, a gentleman came in and gave a presentation about short-term disability benefits and supplemental retirement accounts. I personally found this topic boring, so I took out my laptop and started WATCHING AN EPISODE OF STAR TREK IN FRONT OF EVERYONE. I wasn’t in the corner or anything, I was at a round table in the very center of the room and did absolutely nothing to hide what I was doing. Worse yet, when my boss came up afterwards and suggested I not do that in the future, I was quite put out. After all, I had the sound off and subtitles on! I wasn’t bothering anyone!
Needless to say, the autism diagnosis a few years later was a surprise to exactly no one.
3. The hickeys
The summer I was 19, I had both my first internship and my first girlfriend. I’m not sure how to word this politely, but my girlfriend and I were having a lot of fun, to the point where I would regularly show up with hickeys on and around my neck. Apparently it was bad enough that my supervisor (the managing editor), felt the need to send an email a few days before I was interviewing a prominent local figure to remind me that hickeys are not considered office appropriate, and to please wear a scarf, especially when meeting with important people.
4. The glass door
I once casually jogged into a clear glass door trying to join a board meeting in progress.
5. The prayer group
For the purposes of this story, I’ll be Jo. When I was in college, I got an office job on campus. They day before my first day, I got a message from my manager, Bill, saying,“I’ve been called into a meeting tomorrow morning. Meet my assistant Anne in the lobby at 9. She’ll give you a tour and get you settled, I’ll be back at 10.”
The next morning, I’m in the lobby at ten to nine and a woman approaches me and says, “Jo?” I nod and say, “Anne?” She says yes, we start chatting, and she gives me a tour. It’s a weird tour, nothing is really relevant to my job, but I figure she’s been told to occupy me until Bill gets there.
Anne takes me into a conference room and I meet about 20 other people, all very friendly and welcoming. They invite me to take a seat, and then they begin to pray. I’m confused, but it’s not like I can ask what’s happening. Then the guy two seats down from me says, “I’ll kick us off this week” and begins a personal prayer. Everyone is nodding and saying, “Amen.”
Then the woman next to me starts. Oh no, it’s a circle and I’m next. I’ve never set foot in a church and couldn’t string together a fake prayer if my job depended on it. When it’s my turn, I blurt out, “I don’t know how to do this!” but everyone is so encouraging so I mumble something about keeping my loved ones safe and everyone nods and claps.
It takes a while for everyone to have a turn and it’s almost 10:30 by the time we’re finished. I ask Anne if we should go find Bill. “Who?” she says. “Bill, my manager.” “What manager?” I ask her surname and I realize I have the wrong Anne!
I excuse myself and rush through the building until I find the correct Anne, who is unimpressed that she waited in the lobby for me for 20 minutes and I’m rushing in 90 minutes late. She gets Bill, who is equally unimpressed as I try to explain that my parents gave me the most common girls name of the 80s so I accidentally joined a prayer group instead of coming to work.
For the year I worked there after that, I occasionally ran into members of the prayer group who often invited me back, and it made me want to crawl into a hole and disappear every time.
6. The photos
I was helping an elderly man with his iPhone, and one of the troubleshooting steps involved getting him to sign into his Apple account. He remembered nothing about that account — his daughter wrote down info for him at his notebook at home, he remembered none of it. Since it was the end of the day and I wanted to go home, it was faster to login with my burner account than it was to try and reset his account. He promised me he’d log in to his account at home, we fixed the issue, I figured that was everything.
Two days later, I find out from my coworker he was back the next day because he had a ton of photos on his phone he didn’t remember taking, and he just needed them gone. I didn’t sign out of my burner, and at some point his phone synced from the cloud. My burner had around 20-30 friend group photos … as well as 500+ male nudity photos I’d saved. All of them were downloaded onto this poor man’s phone.
If he had complained about what KIND of photos had appeared, I would have been fired in a heartbeat. It was a stressful few weeks, waiting for a possible customer survey that could end my career.
7. The nap room
I was in my first year of teaching and was being shown around by the custodian during the week of in-service before school started. He and I immediately got along and could recognize the smartass in each other. He was sure to show me that I had a TV that got full cable and that The Price is Right was coming on soon. In response, I had intended to say, “Hey, I’m gonna be in here taking a nap. Whatever you do, do not come in here” as a sort of way to say, “Yeah, I’m gonna hunker down and watch TV while I should be working.”
Readers, instead, I told this 60-year-old man I had just met, “Hey I’m going to go to sleep. Do what you gotta do, but don’t come inside me.”
8. The lack of motivation
In college (late 90s), I interviewed with almost 30 companies during my senior year, trying to land a job offer. In one, the interviewer asked me, “What motivates you?” and my mind. went. blank. Utterly blank. I responded, “I can’t think of anything.” The interview ended shortly after that, and I did not get an offer from that company.
9. The condolences
A few months after I started my last job, my husband’s grandmother passed away. I took bereavement leave and travelled for the funeral, and the CFO sent flowers. Shortly after, my husband met me at work. This would be his first time meeting everyone. I introduced him to the CFO and the following conversation ensued:
CFO: You’re her husband?
Husband: Yes I am.
CFO: My condolences.
Me: (jaw drop)
I mean, I knew what he meant, but still… at least we got a good laugh out of that!
10. The bubble baths
I was in my early twenties, interviewing with a middle-aged man. He asked me how I dealt with stress. I said I like to take bubble baths. I even talked about adding “lots and lots of bubbles.” I did not get the job. I still cringe thinking about it.
11. The self-talk
On the way to the interview, I encountered two accidents that tied up traffic badly so I just barely skated in before the interview time despite having left my house plenty early. I asked to use the restroom before we got started, and when I was looking in the mirror I noticed that a huge zit had appeared on my nose. I said to my reflection, “Nobody’s going to hire you looking that, too old, gray hair, an enormous zit, and overweight. You should just turn around and go home now.”
I’d been looking for three months after having been laid off and was feeling very defeated in the moment.
At that point, the recruiter popped out of a stall and, to her credit, acted as though she hadn’t heard all that. I was mortified.
Fortunately, I wowed the hiring manager and got the job. But, lordy, I cringed every time I saw her in the hall for the first six months I was there.
12. The ingenuity
In an interview I said I admired the ingenuity of a guy that had gotten fired from my previous employer for embezzling money. Srsly???
13. The phlebotomist
I once applied for a job where it could reasonably be assumed that you would need phlebotomy experience. The ad did not explicitly say that, though, and I blithely waltzed into the job interview with zero idea they thought I should be able to draw blood. And me, being young, dumb, and desperate for a job, offered to draw blood from my interviewer to prove that I could (I could not). Mercifully, she didn’t take me up on that offer.
That moment still haunts me, 10+ years later. What the $#%! was I thinking?!?
I have horrible social anxiety, like, constantly thinking that everyone secretly hates me or is judging me. So, when I first started out in the working world, I had trouble coming up with small talk to bond with my coworkers. This was a very creative office, and I didn’t want to ask the same boring old questions, and it was near Halloween, so I decided to ask the ~spooky~ question of “Have you ever seen a ghost?” to one of my coworkers … except I panicked. HARD. I’m talking thoughts going 300 mph while I’m in the middle of the sentence. So, instead of asking “Have you ever seen a ghost,” I went (internally), “Oh gosh, did I already ask this the other day? What if she thinks it’s a weird question? It is kind of a weird question, isn’t it? I should ask something else, but I’m already halfway through this sentence. What can I replace ghost with? Ghosts are dead… dead people… zombies… zombies died… zombies are people who died – uh-”
And then, as casually as I had started the sentence, asked this poor, unsuspecting coworker… “Have you ever seen someone die?”
Cue a completely warranted incredulous reaction and a lifetime of cringing to myself. Thankfully I no longer work there or live near her.
This was long ago, but as a teenager I participated in a group interview at a trendy clothing store. At the end of the interview, we were told to go out on the floor, pick out an outfit, and try to sell it to the manager interviewing us. The manager emphasized we should do this task quickly. Looking back, that was probably to limit disruption in the store. But I saw it as a speed race. I flew out the door of the back room and ran through the racks, grabbing clothes and attempting to slow down my competition. I left stacks of clothes a mess and tried to block access to racks. At one point I even muscled an actual customer out of my way. After what I was sure was a record-setting amount of time, I breathlessly presented my outfit, explaining that if the clothes were ugly (I specifically remember using the word “ugly”) I could get them different clothes before anyone else had even come back with their first ones. The manager was horrified and I was informed I would NOT be getting that job. Looking back, I have no idea what got into me and I feel terrible for making even more work for the people who had to clean up after my spree!