It’s Mortification Week at Ask a Manager, and all week long we’re revisiting ways we’ve mortified ourselves at work. Here are 15 more mortifying stories to enjoy.
1. The Danish
I once ate a danish on my way into an interview. When I used the bathroom afterward, I realized I had a giant piece of glaze stuck to my chin the entire time.
2. The Chair
I was conducting one-on-one preliminary interviews in a small conference room with a round table and two chairs. The previous interviewee left the chair slightly askew when they got up to leave. When the next person came in, they sat down and didn’t swing it back around to face me. We conducted the entire — mercifully short — interview with the interviewee facing about 20 degrees to my left. I was staring at their temple the whole time. I think they made eye contact with me once.
I didn’t hold it against the applicant — they were a new graduate and came off as shy and soft-spoken. After that, I always made sure the chair was pointed toward me before every interview.
3. The Misunderstanding
I took a new job at a small startup IT company of about 20 people. I was very clear in my interview that I did not want to work in a management role. A week or two after I was hired, the two owners told me the reason they hired me was because I was older and more experienced than their other employees, and they wanted me to step in and take over running the company if anything happened to either of them. To other people, this might be a dream come true. For me, it was an absolute nightmare. I immediately started looking for another job.
A recruiter sent me to interview at a larger company. I thought it went well. A few minutes afterward, the recruiter called and immediately asked, “Did you really use the word ‘cock’ in your interview?” I was horrified. I told the recruiter I never use that word even with friends, let alone in an interview. I was in tears at the accusation. After a few minutes, I figured out exactly what had happened: when asked why I was leaving my previous job so quickly, I had said I found myself as “a bigger cog in the organization than I wanted to be.”
The recruiter informed me that the company’s HR person had actually decided to hire me because she felt that if I was comfortable enough to use that word — the bad one — in an interview, I’d be perfectly able to handle myself in a male-dominated IT environment. I ended up working there for about eight years. That HR person was fired shortly after for many other inappropriate behaviors.
4. The Markers
I was working with a class of Advanced Biology students. They were maybe six years younger than me, so I had much more in common with them than with my supervising teacher, who was 20 years older. They had a box of scented markers, and we all got excited smelling them. Too excited. I was the only one who liked licorice, and I gave it a really good sniff.
I managed to give myself a little Chaplin-style mustache — which also resembles that other infamous mustache — and nobody told me. All day long. It was only at the end of the day when my supervising teacher asked what had happened to me that I looked in the mirror. This class was just before lunch, so I spent half a day walking around like that, and not one person said anything.
I don’t sniff markers anymore, no matter the scent.
5. The Demand
A switch in register systems meant that instead of a key, managers had to enter a numeric code. For a brief time, it was common for workers to call for a manager to come key in their numbers — though I always told my staff to phrase it as “bring your numbers.”
That policy lasted only until a young teenager, in front of a lobby full of parents and small children during spring break, got frustrated after calling for a manager several times and yelled at the top of her lungs: “Can I get fingered up here?” She quit on the spot.
6. The Fed-Up Boss
I was in a meeting for a new product test launch — really just a session for us to listen to the product team describe what they’d done and how it would affect customers. My manager forgot to mute himself, and when our admittedly long-winded product manager launched into his presentation, my manager said, “My GOD. Land the PLANE. I hate these people.” He then clearly zoned out, turned on music, and started singing along. Four of us had to ping him before he realized what was happening. He abruptly disconnected. We never spoke of it again.
7. The Lesion
I learned that my coworker thought the word “liaison” was pronounced like “lesion” when she introduced herself to a potential new boss as the “lesion” to other departments.
8. The Acronym
Many years ago, a project received an acronym that spelled out V.U.L.V.A. To our horror, none of us had noticed what it also spelled, because we only ever thought of the words behind each letter. It was three months in when management asked us to stop using it — and it still took us about ten minutes to figure out why.
9. The Shirt
A vendor who was about to make a sales pitch didn’t realize the call had already started and changed from a t-shirt into a collared shirt on camera. It was funny and, honestly, kind of endearing.
10. The Problem
This one is fairly mild but it still haunts me. Years ago I was working retail at a small local store. I was stocking shelves around the corner from the door when I heard the motion sensor bell go off. I went around the corner to help the customer just as she rounded the same corner from the other direction. It was a blind corner and neither of us saw the other coming. We nearly collided and both got startled.
She said, “Oh, sorry!” My brain short-circuited. I tried to say “You’re good!” and “No problem!” at the same time. What came out instead was a slightly halting “Your problem!”
She looked confused and offended, and I had no idea how to recover. She bought her things in silence, and it was excruciatingly awkward.
11. The Ganja
I was 23 or 24 and had just started my first real professional job as a sales coordinator for a real estate developer. It was maybe my third day. We were preparing to open our sales center, and the director of marketing had traveled from the head office to help us set up. We needed light fixtures, so he invited me to walk to some nearby furniture stores.
As we were walking, a girl I didn’t immediately recognize called out, “Hey, Steph!” We were both dressed casually that day since we were doing physical setup work, so it may not have been obvious I was on the clock. I said, “Hey, how’s it going?” while trying to place her. She said, “Good, it’s been a while! We have to get together with Anna sometime and smoke some ganj, get fucked up!” — and did the smoking-a-joint gesture with her fingers to her lips.
I then recognized her: she had very briefly been roommates with my best friend Anna, who was also a professional contact of the marketing director. I had smoked weed with her exactly once. I panicked and said, “Yeah, long time no see — you should give Anna a call!” and tried to signal that we needed to keep moving. She responded, “I totally will, we can get suuuuper baked!” — and did the joint gesture again.
I was mortified. The marketing director didn’t say anything until a couple of hours later, when he kindly offered, “Just so you know, I consider smoking weed the same as having a glass of wine after work — not a big deal.” We laughed about it later once I knew him better, but in the moment I wanted to disappear entirely.
12. The Promise
Wording matters. Years ago we had an intern in her early twenties, and my boss was in her late fifties. The intern had just figured out something we’d been stumped on for a long time. I attempted to say, “If you figure this out, Boss is going to give you a big kiss on the lips!” What actually came out was, “If you figure this out, you will get a full frontal kiss from Boss!”
It was so horrendously awkward that none of us could even pretend I had said something different. It was an entire herd of elephants in the room.
13. The Hangover
My company of around 80 people was in a mandatory training from the legal team on insider trading — a serious and fairly dry topic, with a mix of people attending in person and online. The VP of HR had just logged into Zoom a few minutes late, and apparently didn’t realize she wasn’t muted, because she announced loudly, “Ya girl is HUNG. OVER.” in front of the entire company.
14. The Wrong Reference
Many years ago, I worked at a video rental store. High School Me thought my manager was one of the coolest people ever, so I constantly emulated her interactions with customers — including saying “Put your John Hancock here” when asking someone to sign for their rental.
Until the evening I got confused and said “Put your John Holmes here” to the gentleman checking out some X-rated videos.
I laugh about it now, but whoooooeeee.
(For anyone unfamiliar: John Holmes was a very famously well-endowed porn star of the 1970s.)
15. The Cats
I’d been kept up half the night by cats having very noisy sex in my backyard. Operating on three hours of sleep and with zero filter left, I ended up mentioning this fact during a job interview.
I did not get the job.
