I said earlier that I’ve put my foot in my mouth a thousand times in my day, usually when I should have known better.
My first job at the American Gas Association was the site of several gaffes that should never have happened. There were four hundred people there, working on four different floors. Management was populated by redneck former military guys and men who’d come up from the oil and gas fields.
It was possible to go a year without seeing someone who worked on another floor. My office was on the 11th floor, one floor below the penthouse. I had heard that Alice, who had an office on the ninth floor, was pregnant. I happened to run into her at the elevator bay and could indeed see she was very pregnant.
“Hey Alice, you look like you’re right about to have that baby!” I declared cheerfully/
She turned a cold stare on me and said, “I’m only four months along,” and left. Abruptly.
Well, oops.
In relation to pregnancies and babies, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut. Once or twice, I’ve tried to compliment a mother on her adorable baby. “What a darling little girl,” I’d gush, only to be told, “He’s a boy” in a sharp tone inviting no further conversation.
Girl or boy? You tell me.
Back to A.G.A. There was an older black man who supervised the office supplies. Every day he made his rounds, stopping in to chat, mostly with women. He developed a series of nicknames for some of us, many of which would be considered sexist. However, compared to the general sexist and brutalist atmosphere at A.G.A., his sins were pretty light weight
I got off the easiest of all. Because I wore glasses and worked on the magazine, he called me The Professor. Others didn’t fare so well, including a woman (whose real name escapes me now) who had a very, er, womanly shape. Her nickname was Heavy Duty Judy.
So, of course, when I saw her at the copy machine, I greeted her with a hearty, “Hey Judy!”
Her reply was a huff and the evil eye.
Perhaps one of the stupidest gaffes I came close to making was at a gathering of friends in a restaurant. I was sharing jokes with a couple and launched into one I’d heard recently. I’m a terrible joke teller but I sallied forth anyway, intending to tell them a joke about Alzheimer’s. I was about a fourth of the way in when it came to me in a flash that this woman’s brother suffered terribly from Alzheimer’s and in fact was in a state of deep dementia.
Putting your hands over your mouth does not necessarily stop the words from coming out.
I gasped, leading my friends to wonder if I’d swallowed a fly. Then, to their surprise, I announced that I couldn’t remember the rest of the joke. Not only that, I really, really needed to go to the lady’s room.
Disaster averted but no doubt I left my friends wondering, perhaps not for the first time, what in hell was the matter with me.
Do you have any gaffes to share?
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