Embarrassing True Stories

by Oliver Gaspirtz

  I was standing at the wrong car, 2 rows over. And not only did I not realize that the dogs were not in the car, I also somehow didn't notice that the Jeep I was trying to get into was red, not green. I have no idea how I could have been so absent-minded. I blame it on my medication.

  FLASHER IN ISLE 5

  My older sister and I went shopping. She had her little baby boy with her. We ran into my crush. He's from a rich family. My family lives in a trailer, and I always felt like I wasn't good enough for him, but I didn't want him to know that. So I'm talking to my crush, trying to act all classy, when my sister's son suddenly pulls on my sweatpants. And suddenly they are down around my knees and I'm standing there in my underwear. That might sound sexy, but it wasn't. I was wearing old granny panties, and I looked like a hot mess. That was one of the worst days of my life. My crush didn't even laugh it off or anything. He pretended it didn't happen, which made it even more awkward. Jerk.

  LOOK, SHE HAS BOOBS!

  One of my best friends is about 20 years older than I am. So he's kind of like a father figure to me. We go fishing or out to the shooting range. Or he simply comes over to watch a movie or a TV show.

  We watched the entire series of Spartacus over the course of a few weeks. One or two episodes per night. It's an uncensored show with lots of gory violence and gratuitous nudity. A manly man show. For some reason my friend felt the need to comment on a girl's breasts during a nude scene. I didn't think much of it. But then, during the next nude scene, he commented on that girl's breasts as well.

  And then the same thing during the next nude scene. Every damn time there were boobs on the screen, he felt the need to comment on them: "Hers are small but nice. Wow, hers are huge. Those are perky. Her nipples are pretty big. I like those. Hers are healthy." And so on and so on. It was starting to creep me out. Imagine watching TV with your dad, and he keeps oogling breasts like a little dirty old man. And looking is one thing. But I really don't need the running commentary.

  I figured we were almost done with the final few episodes of Spartacus, and once that show was done, he would hopefully stop making these comments. Then we started watching the entire series of Game of Thrones. And my buddy started making the same kinds of comments about each and every topless girl in that show as well. So finally I had to tell him: "STOP it already! Stop commenting on every single pair of breasts you see. It's creepy!" He stopped for that episode, but then the next time he came over, he started doing it again. He's still doing it!

  DOWN THE DRAIN

  I met this girl on an online dating site. She lived in a different state. We hit it off and finally got to the point where I decided to fly out there and visit her. I was staying in a hotel near her home. We were going to have our very first date in person that night. I was nervous.

  I am missing a front tooth, and I have a cap – a fake tooth. I was brushing my teeth in the hotel bathroom sink, when my cap fell out off my mouth and into the drain. I was shocked, because without that cap, I look like a toothless hillbilly. There was no way in hell I was going to meet this girl for the first time, with a front tooth missing.

  I immediately shut the water off and tried to fish my cap out of the drain with a wire coat hanger. I couldn't reach it. It was too far down. I couldn't even see it anymore.

  I went to the front desk and asked them for help. They told me there was nothing they could do and that once something is down the drain, it's gone for good.

  But there was a u-shaped bend in the pipe below the sink, and I hoped my cap was trapped at the bottom of that U pipe. I decided to take matters into my own hands and ripped the pipe fitting under the sink apart with force. My cap was really still stuck in the pipe. Yesss!

  Then I called the front desk again a few hours later, after shift change, and told them my sink was leaking and that I would like a different room. They put me in a new room without asking any questions.

  OFFICE MEETING

  We had a meeting at work one morning. We had to put our chairs in a circle in the middle of the office, and we were all sitting there, while our boss stood in the middle and asked us productivity questions and stuff like that. I sat there, with my legs crossed confidently, with my left foot resting on my right knee.

  After the meeting I got up and noticed that my underwear from the previous day was stuck in my left pant leg, and it had been hanging out of the bottom of my pants the whole time I sat in the meeting, and everyone saw.

  GETTING ROBBED IN FRANCE

  My husband and I were on vacation in Nice at the French Riviera. One night we were strolling along the boardwalk. The beach was on one side, and the street on the other side of us. I had my purse under my arm that was facing the street. My husband walked on the side of me that was facing the beach. Suddenly a motorcycle drove past us, with two people on it. They wore black leather biker outfits and helmets. The woman sitting behind the driver snatched my purse from under my arm and they sped off. In just a split second, we got robbed! We were in shock. All our important papers, our money, our passports and credit cards were in my purse!

  We drove to the police station and reported the incident. The French police officer wasn't much help and told us that there were a lot of these driveby motorcycle robberies lately, and that the muggers usually dropped off a pile of stolen purses at the beach somewhere, so there was a small chance we might at least get our passports back in a few days. Or not.

  Afterwards we drove along the beach and tried to find those two people on the motorcycle, to try to get my purse back ourselves. And there they were! We found the two people on a motorcycle and followed them downtown. When they turned into a narrow alley, we forced them to pull over. My husband speaks French and he screamed at the two people on the bike: "Give me the purse! Give me the purse!" The driver tried to fight my husband, and his girlfriend on the backseat helped, so I got involved too. I bit her arm as hard as I could. Someone called the cops. It turned out these were the wrong people, and they thought WE were trying to mug THEM! The police came, recognized the confusion, we apologized to the innocent couple, and they let us go.

  GESUNDHEIT!

  I had recently gotten dentures. Just for the top row of teeth. My gums were really swollen for weeks, but finally the swelling went down, and the dentures were now loose. I went shopping one day, and I sneezed pretty hard. My dentures went flying out of my mouth and landed on the dirty store floor. I was so embarrassed, I picked up my dentures and stuck them right back in my mouth. I didn't even care if they were dirty now. Then I ran out of the store and drove home. I was so humiliated, I cried. I am never showing my face in that store again.

  TUPPERWARE SEALS IN THE FRESHNESS

  During my pregnancy, I got a bad case of diarrhea. After three long days of suffering, I finally decided to go see a doctor. I was told to bring a stool sample. Being in the emotional state I was in, I couldn't figure out how to provide a sample of diarrhea.

  So I did what seemed logical to me at the time: I took my very largest Tupperware bowl and sat on it and did my business. I put the lid on the bowl, and brought the whole bowl to the doctor.

  At the doctor's office, I placed the bowl on his desk. You should have seen the look on the doctor's face! I wish I would have had a camera with me. The doctor took my "sample" to the lab to analyze it, and when he returned he, gave me a strange look and asked me if it was always that "potent." That's when I started to get embarrassed. I could have just crawled in hole.

  A nurse rinsed out my bowl and handed it back to me. I threw it in the garbage. And moral of the story? Tupperware really does seal in the freshness! Every time I think about this story, I get embarrassed all over again. I can't believe that I did that! Instead of a tiny little sample, I brought them a big bowl full of sealed in freshness!

  POOR FASHION CHOICE

  For a while it was cool to leave your sneakers untied. All the cool kids in school were walking around with the shoe laces on their sneakers open. I wanted to be part of the cool crowd,
so I wore my sneakers like that, too. But somehow I guess I was doing it wrong, because I tripped and feel flat on my face during lunch. Everyone was laughing at me and making stupid comments like: "Have a nice trip. See you next fall."

  SHOPPING FOR EXOTIC FRUIT

  I'm an immigrant, and English is my second language. My wife is American. We lived in New York together. Although I learned English in school and speak it pretty well, there are American slang words that I never heard in school, and I have to learn them as I go along.

  One day my wife sent me to the supermarket to go buy some groceries. I was in the produce isle, looking for all the items on her list. Lettuce: check. Carrots: check. Broccoli: check. Grapes: check. Strawberries: check. Dingleberries: hmm. Where are they? I couldn't find them. I walked up and down the produce section and looked everywhere. Finally I asked one of the store employees if he could show me where the dingleberries are.

  "You're looking for what?"

  "Dingleberries. I have no idea what they look like. My wife put them on my shopping list. See?" I showed him the list.

  Then he busted out laughing and explained to me what dingleberries are, and that my wife pulled a little joke on me.

  When I came home, she was hysterically laughing at me before I even got a chance to tell her what had happened in the store.

  I got her back a few months later. I fooled her into drinking clam juice, and she didn't know what it was. She almost threw up after she took a big gulp.

  HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

  My boyfriend Tom and I were in college, and I was spending the night in his dorm room. We were having sex and I was giving him a blowjob. I'm a bit shy, so my head was under the covers.

  Suddenly his roommate Craig came home unexpectedly. We were so busy with what we were doing, we didn't even hear him unlock the door, until he was in the room.

  I froze. I didn't know what else to do. I was lying perfectly still, hoping Craig wouldn't notice that I was under the covers, between Tom's legs. He said hello to my boyfriend and then they talked for a few minutes. Tom acted like he was alone in the room all night. Good. Craig obviously didn't notice what was going on. Or so I thought.

  Craig had just stopped by to grab something, and after talking to Tom for a few minutes, he left again. As he walked out the door, he said: "Good night Tom. Good night Lisa."

  I wanted to die.

  ALLERGIC REACTION

  I bought a new vibrator and my boyfriend and I were going to try it out for the first time. At first everything seemed great, but then I started to notice that I was getting really itchy down there. Then, after just a few minutes, there was redness. Even on my inner thighs. Not very sexy. And highly embarrassing. Apparently I was allergic to whatever rubber that thing was made of.

  DON'T OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY

  I was on my third date with this great guy, and I knew we were going to have sex that night. I was nervous, because it had been quite a while since the last time I had sex, so I had a few too many drinks at the restaurant. I had also taken a Xanax earlier to calm my nerves. They say those pills and alcohol don't mix. They're right. When we had sex later that night, I gave him a blowjob, and fell asleep in the middle of it, with his penis in my mouth. He woke me up, and we tried to laugh about it, but it definitely killed the mood.

  BLIND DATE

  I met a guy on Plenty of Fish and we agreed to go out on a date. We both lived in Los Angeles, and we were supposed to meet up in Long Beach. I was there, but I didn't see him. I called him, and he said he was just a few feet away and he was looking right at me. I looked around and didn't see anyone that looked like the pictures he had sent me. He described what he was wearing. Then I saw him. He was a midget! Or a little person or whatever the politically correct term is these days.

  He had only sent me pictures of his face, and his face looked normal. And he never mentioned on the phone that he was a midget. And now here he was, only about 4 feet tall. I don't want to sound mean, but I feel that he should have said something about that before we met, and ask me whether I would be ok with it or not. I didn't want to be rude, so I didn't just leave, and we hung out for a little bit. But it was really awkward and uncomfortable.

  LEARNING THE HARD WAY

  I grew up in New York City. When my parents moved us to the countryside in Lehigh Valley, PA, I had never seen cow pastures, or cows for that matter. I was about 10 years old when I saw my first cow. Anyway, I made friends with the kid next door, and we were playing outside. I had to pee, so I decided to pee against a fence post. My friend yelled at me to be careful. I had no idea what he was talking about, until I peed on the electric fence. I got zapped so hard, I thought my peepee was going to fall off. I never ever peed on an electric fence again after that.

  MAKING FRIENDS

  After my divorce I moved from Boston to Florida. I didn't know anybody down there, I worked from home, and I don't like going to bars or clubs, so it's not that easy for me to meet new people. One day I was browsing through the classifieds on Craigslist and noticed a section for platonic friends. It was a bunch of ads of people in the same situation as me, living in a new area, and looking to meet some new people to find friends to go out to eat, or jogging buddies or weight loss partners.

  I saw an ad from a guy who sounded just like me. He had just moved to Florida from up north, was self-employed, didn't really know anyone and wanted to make some new friends. I answered his ad. We talked on the phone. He seemed like a nice guy. Then he told me that he's gay and hopes that that doesn't offend me. I told him I was ok with that, but that I was straight. I made that very clear.

  We ended up meeting and hung out for a while. He said he was rich and owned a magazine. He said his Porsche had broken down out of town a few days earlier. When I drove him home, it turned out he lived in someone's dirty garage that was filled with old furniture from the garbage.

  He had an old mangy dog and claimed it was a trained attack dog. He claimed he was a real estate investor and that he bought the whole shitty neighborhood and was going to redevelop it. Then he claimed that he owned a Catamaran boat, and that the CIA had hired him to travel the world on his boat and be an international spy. Seriously. Then he offered to give me a blowjob. Turns out, he was a homeless male prostitute who thought I wanted to have sex with him.

  MY FAVORITE MOVIE

  I grew up in Germany. When I was about 12 years old, a married couple from America lived next door. They both were US soldiers stationed in my home town, and they had a son who was about my age.

  I started to learn English in school, but I wasn't very good at it yet. But I was good enough to communicate with him, even if it required a lot of gesturing and pointing at stuff. We became best friends, and we had sleepovers every now and then.

  One day I was staying over at his house again. We played board games with his mom that night. We were talking about everything and nothing, and his mom asked each of us what our favorite movie was. When it was my turn to tell them about my favorite movie, I told them it was called The Fuck.

  Suddenly it got very quiet in the living room. They both just stared at me with their mouths open. "Your favorite movie is what?" my friend's mom asked.

  "The Fuck. It's a great movie," I explained. "There's these zombie pirates who attack a small town and..."

  Then they both started to laugh, and his mom told me that my favorite movie was called The Fog and that I was pronouncing it wrong. Then she explained that fuck is a bad word in English, and what it meant. I blushed, because I must have sounded like a little pervert.

  ACCIDENTALLY FLASHING MY SISTER

  I met this guy online and I really liked him. He lived in another state. After a few weeks of talking on the phone, we agreed to exchange naked pictures. I was hesitant, because a few years earlier, in high school, my ex-boyfriend had spread my naked pictures all over school after we broke up. I was humiliated. But my out-of-state crush promised he would never do that to me, and I trusted him. I sent him a topless
picture. Or so I thought. I accidentally texted the picture to my sister instead. Luckily she was cool about it and just replied: "LMAO!!! Wrong person. DELETE!"

  PLAYING DEAD

  When my son was about 8 years old, he had this weird little tick. He liked to play dead in public. One time, when we ate some pizza, he went limp again, and slowly slid off the bench, onto the floor under the table. I just ignored him, because I had seen him do this a hundred times before.

  But the other people in the pizzaria were looking at him. And when he was just lying there on the floor under the table and didn't move, they started to point at him and talk to each other. After a few minutes, everyone in the whole place was staring at me and my son.

  "Is he alright?" one woman asked, and got off her chair and walked over to our table. "Kid, are you ok?"