Embarrassing/Amusing Professional Gaffes

[JWags85]

My sister sent the group chat with our siblings a video clip from a work zoom this morning.  In it, one of her remote coworkers both messed up in blurring her background as well as not muting herself as intended which lead to a 30 second period where she baby talked her cat sitting next to her until someone else in the meeting was like "umm Diane? Might want to mute".  Harmless but still fairly mortifying depending on the person. 

Made me think of some of my embarrassing professional miscues that still make me cringe.  More of the social/work dynamic nature and not a brutal work screw up that affected my job or the company (haven't really had any of those thankfully.) Two still haunt me...

First, when I was 24, I worked as a prop trader for a firm in the CME for around 9 months.  Challenging and dynamic work environment, but around 6 months in, I managed to ingratiate myself with some of the older (mid 30s) traders.  Funny enough, it started when I messed up an exit on a trade that went south, and I jumped out of my chair and kind of kicked at the air.  No clue to this day what possessed me, but one of the guys sitting near me dubbed me "Spin Kick" and my ability to own it and laugh at an embarrassing moment got me invited out for a few happy hours over the next few weeks.  At one of them, we were having a fun chat and some others joined our circle.  One of them, a big former B10 OLB, spread his arms and said "why don't we bring it on in" meaning to merge the 2 groups into a bigger circle...but I assumed he was offering a hug given our chat.  So I hugged him and got a "what the hell dude"? It was quickly laughed off and became another light hearted banter point but I was ready to melt into the wallpaper.

The other happened a few years later the trading firm had folded and I was working in strategy at an ad firm and had a relatively new German guy for a boss.  Great guy but very blunt (as you'd expect).  We were working on my goals/plan for the year and he was saying how one should be a bit out of the box, ambitious, kind of out there.  "You have the more direct metric measured goals, but then have one be a bit crazier, like to be a total rockstar".  The week before we had been talking at lunch how I played a lot of shows/open mics in college and how I wanted to get back into writing music and performing again since I hadn't really in Chicago.  So I thought he was referring to that, not sure why.  But thought, maybe he's meaning a merging of personal out of the office ambition to drive my professional work performance in the office. (In reality he mentioned just to be a high performing standout on the team above all others) .  So I put "fully write, record, and professional mix an EP by the end of the year", which was something I had wanted to do a couple years earlier before my professional life got sidetracked.  I will never forget the look on his face as he got to that bullet point and then blurting out "what the f*** does this have to do with work?!" And then me awkwardly trying to explain how I mistook his meaning.  We ended up having a great working relationship and his reco to a former colleague is the main reason I got my next job which completely changed my career, but I've still never felt more foolish and dumb in a professional setting and hearing "be a rockstar" in any professional or job setting makes me shudder.

Honorable mention from my time at Pepsi is apparently being so loud and enthusiastic, along with another fellow junior coworker, during a group game at a corporate retreat (while mildly buzzed of course) that it surprised and amused the President of our division, who had entered the room without us noticing.  He was a tall, elegant, refined Swiss guy brought from the European HQ specifically by Pepsi's CEO to reshape the brand I was on.  He made some side comments about it to a few other senior people there, which naturally made us gulp a bit.
From that point on whenever I or my coworker was presenting in a meeting or in a convo that he was nearby, he'd say something like "could you be a bit louder please? I know you're capable of it".  In retrospect, it was actually a positive to stand out and not be faceless to a key leader way senior to me and he used it as an endearing touch point, but sheesh, I was nearly 30 and felt like a doofus frat dude for awhile.

[tower912]

Cooked a nearly inedible meal on 'rookie cookie day'.  The upside is I was never asked to cook again.

Second (and third) were incidents where I walked into poisonous clouds searching for victims at haz-mat scenes and had to strip down for emergency decontamination after exiting the clouds.   Man, that water was cold.