the marriage coupon, the peer feedback form, and other stories to cringe over

It’s Mortification Week at Ask a Manager and all week long we’ve been revisiting ways we’ve mortified ourselves at work. Here’s the final installment — 15 more mortifying stories people have shared here over the years.

1. The criticism

I’m a marketing copywriter. At a job several years ago, the creative director was showing me a print mail flyer that she wanted to work with me on updating. As she was going over the changes she wanted to make to the design, I nodded in agreement and said, “Oh that sounds amazing! And good thing, this current design is awful. Who designed this?” She waited a beat before saying, “I did.” I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

2. The coupon

I’ve worked remotely at my company for 20 plus years. I have a virtual personal computer installed on my work machine (I know, bad idea soon to become a worse idea). My son was hired at my company to work in person about two years ago (this will become highly relevant as you will see).

It was my husband’s 50th birthday and I wanted to do something special for him, so I thought I logged onto my virtual machine and typed up a big ol’ flyer advertising a themed hotel where he would receive a special treat from me (if you follow my drift). Once I was satisfied the flyer was perfect, I hit print and walked across the room to my printer to await my masterpiece. And waited … and waited … and slowly the horror of realization came over me. I ran back to my computer to confirm what I mortifyingly already knew — I had not been on my virtual machine, but my work one, and readers, I’d sent this sex coupon for my husband to the work main office printer. I live over an hour away.

My choices crystalized before me each one worse than the last. I could do nothing and hope that the person who found it sitting there would simply laugh and throw it away (instead of say, posting it for the office to see; hubs’ picture was on the flyer and many people at work know he is my husband). I could call up IT to try and get the print cancelled and retrieved and fall on my on sword when I knew they would see exactly what I wanted cancelled (hopefully containing my mortification to only one department) or … still mortifying buy slightly less horrifyingly so, I could call up my son and beg him to run to the printer and grab the sex coupon his mother had printed up for his father.

Yes, I chose option 3. Fortunately he was successful in his mission, but to this day many years later it lives on in family lore as what not to do with your work laptop.

3. The non-French-speaker

Not me, one of my youngggggg coworkers. I had a very uncomfortable conversation with a furious client whose complaint about said coworker was that “he called me dumb ass” and I had to explain that my young employee doesn’t speak or read French, Mr. Dumas.

4. The dirtbag

I was interviewing for the job I have now, so the ending is a happy one.

I found out that one of my interviewers would be Mike, a man my father had worked with at the same company many years ago. My father told me they bonded over their Navy backgrounds, and used to call one another “dirtbag” (apparently a friendly term between them).

Well, during my interview, I was feeling so relaxed, so confident, so competent, that I said to Mike, “I hear you’re a dirtbag.” He laughed.

I didn’t give it another thought until I was in the car on my way home. As soon as I got home, I wrote the best apology letter I was capable of.

It turned out not to be a big deal at all, but to this day, I advise my younger relatives never to use the word “dirtbag” during a job interview.

5. The dancing figures

HR recalled an email quickly — but not quickly enough — that used a graphic of “dancing figures” in the background for some sort of team building invitation. If they had looked more closely before sending, they would have noticed the dancing figures were demonstrating a wide variety of tantric positions.

6. The peer feedback

My first job would send out a peer feedback form every 6 months. The first time it came out, I wrote long, obnoxious diatribes about the supposed shortcoming of all of my peers. We had some really inexperienced managers who then forwarded the feedback, verbatim, to the people it was about. Everyone spent weeks speculating about who wrote which comments, while I tried to keep my head down.

7. The bad answer

I was in the final interview stages for a tenure-track teaching job at a local college. I was pretty much guaranteed the job if I didn’t screw up the last interview.

I was asked why I wanted the job. I said, “It’s really close to my apartment, so if I’m out late drinking the night before I can drive to work when I’m hung over without too much trouble.”

(I didn’t get the job, but I did get sober about six months later.)

8. The cuddle

On Slack I asked a coworker to join me in a “cuddle” instead of a “huddle.”

9. The cheerleader

I often respond to texts from my supervisor with a cheerful “got it!” Unfortunately I have a hard time with the spacing for some reason and often type “go tit!” like I am some sort of cheerleader for chests.

10. The unmuted mike

An absolute delight of a coworker, genuinely kind and funny and thoughtful, once had the misfortune of accidentally unmuting during an all-day, all-company, recorded meeting attended by hundreds of people while singing to themself, “I don’t want to work today. I don’t. want. to work. today. I don’t want to wooooork todaaaaay!” And then had to be notified out loud by name by the person they interrupted that we all could, in fact, hear that.

11. The ozone testing

I worked at a bottling factory for about a week. We use ozone to sterilize the finished product. It takes 24 hours for the ozone to degrade. When ozone is still present, the product is not drinkable. If you drink ozonated product, you will have an immediate gastric distress of Contaminated Taco Bell proportions. This was emphatically conveyed to all new employees, since employees sometimes made the mistake (exactly once) of taking product off the line to drink. (Side note: Ozone is actually a really cool and safe alternative to chlorine. Check out Down to Earth with Zac Efron, season 1 episode 2 if you’d like to nerd out).

Anyway, there was an employee giveaway fridge in the break room, and everyone took turns keeping it stocked by wheeling cases from a corner of the warehouse where giveaway pallets were dropped off. Usually the pallets had minor quality issues, like illegible date codes. I, being new, wanted to make a good impression by helping stock the fridge on my break.

I took cases from a pallet that had some weird sign on it: “vent testing in progress.” I didn’t know what vent testing was and just assumed the product must be leftover from some kind of QA test. After all, it was in the giveaway area.

I stocked the fridge with poison drinks and made the entire shift violently ill. Turns out, vent testing is a test to see if the ozone degrades in the required time.

There was much outrage about how leadership was going to watch the videos and fire the idiot who can’t read signs, so in the middle of a shift meeting full of people, I blurted out that it was my fault and ran out of there.

12. The brain freeze

Many years ago, I worked as the receptionist at a company. We were hiring several new people and so we had a lot of interviewees coming in.

One man came in for his interview appointment. I asked him for his name. He stared at me blankly with a “deer in headlights” panicked look and froze. Then he looked down at his interview folder, opened it, and read his name to me from his resume. As soon as he did that, he turned bright red, and begged me not to tell anyone that he’d managed to forget his own name. I confess, I was laughing so hard. He did end up getting the job in our office and I teased him about it for a long time.