You Have Some Toilet Paper Stuck to Your Shoe…

*This would’ve been posted a week ago if I wasn’t such an asshole, or if I didn’t discover the “watch pilots early” function on Xfinity online, or if I didn’t have a job where accidentally locking a key inside the drawer it unlocks thrusts you into an awkward and only REMOTELY warranted category of “the girl who does mindlessly stupid things like locks keys in drawers.”

..Such as the moment when this person realizes they used the wrong form of you’re

I’m on of those people that is über in tuned to everyday social awkwardness — like it’s painful for me to watch two newly acquainted people in mid conversation because I can tell that one of them is slowly running out of things to say and their darting eyes are saying it way too loudly. If I’m talking to a coworker and she starts touching her face, I’ll immediately start mirroring the action as if her body is subconsciously telling me I have shit on my face. I’d rather look stupid wiping my face for no reason than look stupid with shit on my face and the inability to take a hint.

Before I leave the bathroom, I check three times to make sure there is no toilet paper stuck to my shoes, or making a train out of my skirt — not only because of how embarrassed I’d be, I’m taking into account here the painful 3rd party embarrassment of every one that would see me, frozen in indecision, unable to expose my mistake for fear of having to watch my reaction. I’d rather walk across the bathroom three times, staring at my back side to the glares of incoming females, then deal with that horror.

Then there’s dress code. Most of my day at work is spent watching people walk away to their desk. Yes, if there was a hidden camera filming me every day it would look like a documentary about the judgmental, sex crazed, stalker nature of the Millennial female receptionist. I just can’t stop watching people walk away — I need to study the “heel walk” more closely while stockpiling more outfit ideas. Plus I know everyone stares at me in the break room when I stand on the step ladder in my pencil skirt to stock up the coffees. It’s a classy balance.

With this said, I want to bring attention to the giant piece of toilet paper that was trailing from my shoe after my last post. It was a typical post about my hilarious existence, immaculately edited with silly pictures for good measure. I’ve been doing this thing recently after my posts where I try not to act like I’m Tom Hanks in Cast Away and my notifications icon is Wilson. It was going well until I realized I hadn’t heard any alerts from my phone, like AT ALL. I reasoned with myself, well you posted kind of late, idiot and this is what happens when you get a job and forget about your real friends. Then I looked at the post. YOU GUYS. It was a half a sentence long: “I don’t go out much but when I do” is what it said. Granted, that was the opening to my post but that was ALL it was, the first half of the opening sentence. Immediately, I started crying like I did when my mom would forget to call the house I was sleeping over and pretend I had to come home for something.

It was on facebook and twitter! I would be exposed for the tehchophobe I really am. Technology hated me. The girl who trained me in my current job, and who has since had to explain to me thirty times how to set up a video conference, can really testify to this. For an hour, while I sat patiently pretending not to wait for new WordPress notifications, my awkwardness was on display for the ten people that read my blog world to see. I started swearing at Tengo to the point where I convinced myself he was behind the whole thing because I hadn’t walked him that day.

AND YOU ALL. Where’s the solidarity? Where’s the “hey, looks like you have some toilet paper hanging out of your pants, Aly.” For a whole HOUR I had a post out there that was a half a line long — and people were reading it and then quickly moseying along to the next  properly posted blog entry written by someone whom technology doesn’t hold a grudge against. I hadn’t been that embarrassed since 8th grade when my mom decided to come to school during gym to tell my boyfriend to stay away from me and that he was “a real creepy kid.”

Thankfully, by the power of some technological feature that saves previous drafts of your post, I was able to salvage most of what I had written. (Yes, I see that technology ended up saving my ass in the end but no, I will not apologize to it.) You didn’t have another copy somewhere, you ask? No, that’d be what the PREPARED person does, the person who doesn’t just make To-Do lists to cross things out, the person who remembers to use a calendar to remember the things she has to do in the future. I am not that person. I am merely a flawed human who occasionally forgets how awkward she is; Mostly because I’m too busy looking at your outfit as you walk away.