the hickey, the bad translation, and other stories to cringe over

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 bad translation

I used to volunteer at a thrift store where a lot of my work consisted of hanging up clothes that customers had left lying around. Once a woman started taking multiple items off their hangers, looking at them, and then dropping them on the floor. I could tell she was Sri Lankan, and so am I (originally, anyway), so I said to her in Sinhalese, “Please pick up those clothes.”

Unfortunately my Sinhalese is not very good. What I actually said to her was, “Please raise your skirt.”

I was advised to speak to the customers in English from then on.

2. The hickey

I worked at a bank’s wealth management department. Very conservative office. My husband and I were trying to conceive at the time. We did the deed one morning before work so we were both running late. I put my hair in a low ponytail, made peace with zero makeup and rushed in to work.

Later that day I’m chatting with 2 senior managers in one of their offices when one abruptly stops and yells, “Oh my gosh, what’s wrong with your neck!”

Just then I flash back to my morning’s activities and realized I must’ve had a huge hickey prominently on display. My hand shot to my neck, just as the commenting manager realized what it was and sputtered, “Oh wait, never mind…”

Second manager laughed it off and said something along the lines of “oh, newlyweds.” I’d been married for three years but decided to take the excuse and chime in, “Yeah, we’re very in love.”

I still want to crawl into a hole thinking about it.

3. The low morals

Back when I worked for a public library, they had a town hall session to which the public was invited to comment. One citizen stood up and went on a tirade about how poorly the staff was treated, leading us to have low “morals.”

She meant “morale.” Someone even questioningly corrected her, but she just kept going on about the librarians’ low morals.

4. The noxious cloud

I was working in IT, and my manager and I were standing very close together to look at a server rack. I realized I had to fart, but thought I could hold it and thought that would be better than suddenly excusing myself. However, the fart had other ideas. Suddenly, it was there — a terrible, terrible, silent but deadly, hot garbage fart. My manager was talking and I just stood there, frozen. He suddenly stopped talking and went, “UHHaggghh.” I stayed frozen and didn’t say anything.

There we stood, two people trapped in my toxic fart cloud. When it was clear I was ignoring it, he did too, and we never spoke of it.

5. The giant straw sunhat

Fond memories of an intern who once showed up to our (rather staid and conservative) office on “casual Friday” wearing a strapless mini-shorts romper and a giant straw sunhat, which she wore at her desk for the whole day.

6. The auto-correct

I once sent a text reply to a fairly new coworker that was supposed to say, “Don’t worry, I won’t rat you out!” but it autocorrected to, “Don’t worry, I won’t eat you out!”

7. The sign-off

Did you ever notice that “r” and “t” are close to each other on the keyboard? Also, “h” and “n.” Which is how I sent an irritable email to a colleague and signed it “Thanks, Satan” instead of Sarah…

8. The wet pants

At an office job, the accounting manager was scolding me for something (I disremember what; I was new and had made a mistake somewhere). She was quite grouchy and intimidating in general.

I had stopped by her desk but I was really on my way to the bathroom — after dancing about a minute, I excused myself, promised to be right back, and ran to the bathroom. When I turned on the water to wash my hands, it shot out with the force of a firehose, ricocheted off the basin, and splashed all over the crotch of my pants.

I stayed in the bathroom for a good 10 minutes trying to mop up with eleventy billion paper towels. I’m sure she thought she had scared me into peeing my pants, but it was the sink, Debbie!

9. The marshmallows

I’m a semi-professional theater actor and I once did a show where I had to eat what looked like old moldy food from a garbage dump. It was really just some marshmallows with black food coloring.

The theater world is not too large, so when my director told us her friend was coming, and that her friend just finished her originating role on Broadway as the wife of a certain founding father, we were excited.

So after the show, we meet her. She’s so kind and professional, and everyone does all the normal stage door pleasantries. She says, “Great show! I can’t believe you had to eat that moldy garbage!” Rather than responding like a human, I say, “Thanks! those marshmallows make my poop turn green.”

I guess I threw away my shot.

10. The Oompa-Loompa song

I once worked in a call center where a colleague (“Sam”) left a message for a client, forgot to hang up, and proceeded to sing the Oompa-Loompa song from Willy Wonka for a good five minutes. The elderly lady he’d dialed was very confused and called back to understand why her insurance company was leaving messages with songs in them. It sounded like it was a challenging conversation, but she eventually understood and called him “Singing Sam.”

11. The interview

A guy who applied for a job at the grocery store my partner works at came in to ask about his interview later that day … and actually shoplifted (in an obvious manner) on the way out. Right after informing everyone who he was.

When he came in for the actual interview later, they immediately confronted him about it and he asked “if this meant he couldn’t work there.”

12. The murder chair

This is secondhand mortification on behalf of someone I was interviewing. He came in clearly nervous as all get out. It was me and two coworkers interviewing him in a small conference room. He kept biting his nails and must have gone too far because then his thumb started bleeding. We all noticed, but didn’t want to make a big deal about it … but then he started rubbing his bleeding thumb under the table to clean off the blood. Like just kept it there the rest of the interview. At the end he shook our hands with his “clean” hand and left. We looked under the table and it was as if there was a murder at his chair. It was all over. Needless to say, we used quite a bit of sanitizer on that table.

13. The big dip person

A few months into my current job, I was confidently announced to my entire team, including my boss, that I’m a “big dick person” during a conversation about guacamole over lunch. My boss laughed so hard she cried when I tried to sink into the floor. She then made me repeat myself when a coworker who’d joined lunch late so she wouldn’t miss out on the hilarity.

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