It’s time for coffee. I’ve been at work for a couple of hours already. The train journey was an hour of trying to avoid catching anyone’s eye, while attempting to stare out of a window covered in badly-spelt graffiti poetry.
I get up from my desk, walk across the open-plan office and realise as I get to the kitchen that my fly is open. Worse, my white shirt hem is poking out like a little flag of surrender. This sounds like the kind of dream you remember in a panic, only it really happened.
Perhaps those moments of public humiliation aren’t all bad. They just feel pretty mortifying at the time.
I still shudder when I remember the time at a different workplace, when we’d won an international award in environmental law. We had to go to Parliament to collect the substantial prize and then meet with international delegates to discuss how we’d use the lump sum.
As we introduced ourselves I blurted out that “every time I have to do admin a little piece of me dies”. My job was office administrator. My boss looked at me as if I was a deer that had just bounded in front of his headlights. I was encouraged to look for other work shortly after that.
As communications manager for another company, I’d been asked to do a radio interview over the phone with a Muslim community station. The line was bad, and I lost contact in the middle of a sentence. Frustrated, I looked at my dead phone. Swore, loudly: the word that goes with and after “mother”. The call hadn’t ended, I was still live and on air (but not for very long).
Embarrassment isn’t always about those Homer Simpson “D’oh!” moments. It’s that feeling you get on your first day at a new job and the phone rings. You answer it, not knowing anything about who works with you in the office or how to answer anyone’s queries. You may as well be answering a public phone.
It’s the blush of shame on realising you’ve completely omitted to diarise a meeting, an hour after it was supposed to happen.
The extra tequila you had at the end of year function that turned your legs rubbery but provided endless photo opportunities.
The time you went to a function at a beautiful five star hotel and the waiter offered you a serviette for the samoosas you were putting in your pockets. (What was I even thinking?)
Calling your manager “dad” when he isn’t your father.
Writing an article on a porn star (purely for professional reasons) and then searching her Twitter timeline for a safe-for-work image, only to have your boss walk up behind you just as explicit body parts thrust onto the screen. Your boss with the LOUD OUTSIDE VOICE who then announces to the office that you’re LOOKING AT PORN.
That last incident probably won’t happen to you, but you will have moments when you cringe at work. Something I have learned through them is that they aren’t that bad, retrospectively.
I check my zip these days before going to work and out in public.
I have a job I love now and don’t go to work and feel like “a little piece of me dies”.
If I do a radio interview, I don’t need to keep a swear jar nearby.
I watch my alcohol intake at office functions.
I am more careful about searching for images for articles, and about what I type into Google.
All of these things exposed a bit of me, but they also allowed my colleagues to realise I am just as human as they are. No one is infallible or perfect. Mostly we’re able to look back on these moments and laugh.
And those samosas really were incredibly tasty.
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