Embarrassing Dating 101

I remember my cousins teasing me once when I was younger and I said something mean to tease them back. They continued to tease me until I got mad/hurt and started to cry. My dad heard me and called me over to tell me that if I am going to dish it out then I have to be able to take it. To me feeling embarrassed is similar. If I'm going to put myself in a situation to cause myself to feel embarrassed, then I have to take it.

I've felt embarrassed at various times in my life. I guess that's saying that I've allowed myself to get into situations where embarrassment is inevitable. This one has to be the worst embarrassing moment I've had and the hardest humble pill to swallow. Here we go...

I attended Ricks College before my mission back in the summer of 96. I was a freshman and thought it would be a good idea to take a dance class, so I did. I danced with a girl a few times during the course of the semester. All I knew was her first name. And that was all I needed at the time for my shy teenage hormones to devise a plan to ask her out to the up coming dance without having to do it in person.

I put it off until a week or less before the dance. I still didn't have the courage to do it on our last day of class before the weekend dance. So now I had to call her, but I didn't have her number. Ricks college had a nice system in place where one could look up fellow classmates class schedules, addresses and phone numbers by either typing in their first or last name. All I had was a first name, so I methodically went through the list of 100 Amy's to find the one that was in my dance class thus giving me her number. I found only one on the list whose schedule matched mine and guess what, there was no number listed on her schedule. But now I had a last name to go with, so I simply called the school operator and told them the first and last name and they gave me a phone number.

I was running out of time and I knew I needed to ask soon. So I mustered up enough courage to call figuring that she'd already had been asked to the dance by some other guy by now, but figured it was still worth a shot. After all, I had worked hard to find out her number, so I called her.

I was very nervous when she answered the phone, my heart was about to beat out of my chest and kept crawling up my throat blocking my words. I told her I was Brady from her dance class and asked if she knew who I was. I mentioned that I was the tall one (I am about 6'5") and she said that she thought she knew me. I asked her if she would like to go to the dance and to my surprise, she said yes!!! I then got her address to come by and drop off her matching shirt (it was a matching shirt dance). I hung up the phone feeling on top of the world!

Somehow in the next day I managed to brag to everyone that I had ever talked to in my life, that I was going to the dance with the hottest girl (My wife is so much prettier and I'm glad my realationship with Amy didn't last long or else I wouldn't have met such a high caliber of woman as my wife!) I wish I hadn't told everyone, because when I went to her apartment to drop off the shirt, one of her roomates answered the door and I said, "Hi , Is Amy here?", (two other roomates were on the couch giggling at me), the roomate who answered replies with a confused look, "I'm Amy!" To which I hurridly say "Um, here's your shirt, I'll pick you up tomorrow at 5! Bye!" and I hightail it out of there. Not the Amy I was expecting to see.

So I get to my apartment that night and she calls, tells me she thinks I have the wrong Amy. I lie and say I was nervous. She calls my bluff and says "No, I think you meant to ask someone else out." I finally decide to come clean and tell the truth. The truth shall set you free right?! What they should say is the truth shall set you free after you pay any due consequences. We'll I tell the truth that I did think I was asking out another Amy. She gets defensive and says, well, you can find the other Amy and ask her out then! I (feeling so humiliated at this point) tell her that it doesn't matter who I go to the dance with I just want to go and that I would like it if she would like to go with me still.

She does and long story short, it was the most akward date of my life! Lesson learned. No wait it wasn't...I called my wife to ask her out on our first date. But for those of you still dating, ask girls out face to face when possible. And if calling them to ask them out, make sure you have the correct number. So now that I just dished it out, feel free to post your embarrassing moments. I can take it.

Skiing, nail guns, and pivot lights

After my mission in 99, I returned home and secured employment with a family connection working for a small construction company in Idaho. We built most of a house before I was pulled off the job to build 2 large potato cellars (It was Idaho you know). During that summer I became friends with a few of the other guys on the crew and we hung out after work some, going golfing, boating, or to going to single adult activities.
It was that summer that I was introduced to the nail gun. The other guys on the crew would tell stories about who nailed what body part with the nail gun. Our boss once nailed his knee while kneeling down and it locked it in place. He was up on the roof at the time and somehow he had to be brought to the hospital to have it removed. Or one of my friends told me about the time he nailed two of his fingers together. The stories abounded and I guess it was only time before I had my run in with the nail gun. I ended up shooting my self near the palm of the hand right where the thumb begins. I hurriedly pulled it out and the veteran carpenter who was with me looked at me like "Why did you stop nailing?" And I held up my hand and he sees the nail sticking out from my glove and he says "hold on" and starts to set down whatever he was holding. We'll not wanting someone else to pull the nail out I quickly yanked it out with my un-maimed hand. I was lucky. It didn't go very deep at all for my thumb bone had stopped it in its path through my hand. It really would have wigged me out to see it going in one side and coming out the other, so I'm glad it didn't go that far. Now if I had only shot myself that summer, that would have been one thing. But to have shot one of my friends is another.
Greg was watching me nail some boards with the nail gun a month or two later and was standing above me looking down at the brace boards I was nailing in place. I didn't have the vantage point that he did so I had to guess where the other side of the board was I was nailing, then when I was finished, I could look on the other side to see how many nails had missed the board. We'll doing this one time he make a comment that I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn and I playfully went for his foot with the nail gun. To my shock I had the trigger held down so that when the barrel of the nail gun touches against something, it fires a nail. It did so at this time nailing my friends foot to the board he was standing on. He couldn't move. It took me a second to realize what I had done, then that sickening feeling of horror mixed with embarrassment washed through my body. How could I have been so stupid and careless! "Oh my gosh Greg did I get you!" I couldn't quite tell if it had gone through the end of his foot near his toes or if there were some slim chance it had gone between two of his toes. He stood there dumbfounded and said in shock "I, I uh, I don't know!" We quickly got the attention of the whole crew and Brian one of the veteran workers came over with his cats claw to retrieve the nail. If blood came out on the end of the nail, that would be the tell tell sign. Brian gracefully withdrew the nail, and it was bloodless! Greg then removed his foot from the shoe and there was just a minimal amount of blood on his sock as the nail had luckily scraped the side of one of his toes as it passed by. Tis just a scratch and not a flesh wound like we had all feared. I was so relieved yet now the wave of embarrassment was reaching its peak. I was wishing that I could be one of the kids in "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" and shrink down to the size of an ant. Of course my friend would probably have squished me, so he just decked me in the face and broke my nose instead. Okay okay, he didn't hit me and didn't break my nose. But that adds more drama to the story. He quickly forgave me and we finished out the rest of the summer without any more accidents.

For the record, my wife has heard me tell the story briefly many times and it frustrates her how I tell people I shot my friend in the foot with a nail gun and nailed him to a board. She points out that I didn't shoot him in the foot, just the shoe. While she is right, I tell the story as it seemed when I was going through it. I had indeed thought I had shot him through the foot. To tell the story the other way would be like hearing a story backwards. "I shot my friend's shoe with a nail gun.(People not amazed at story) His foot was in the shoe at the time (This story is boring). The foot was slid perfectly so that two toes were placed between the nail. (Can you shoot me with a nail gun?) How lucky we were that I didn't shoot his foot with the gun huh? (Can you please tell me an accounting story? That would be more exciting.)

I am an accountant. I have to hold on to the precious story gems of my youth. Remind me sometime to write about lacerating calves (green cheerios) or castrating pigs. I couldn't believe what a huge hit these stories were at work when I told my co-workers here in the D.C. area! When you tell another Idaho farmer a story like that, they don't even bat an eye.