5 embarrassing office stories that will make you cringe

istockphoto

This story was updated on July 18, 2012, after we received new information about one of the sources

Despite best intentions, embarrassing things happen in the office. Recently, I read an OfficeTeam survey that included such mild mishaps as falling asleep while interviewing a candidate and coming to work with two different color shoes on. These results seemed pretty tame. Surely, there must be more titillating tales out there.

From my own informal survey, here are six embarrassing office tales that you surely won't be able to forget -- although the people involved in them might want to.

When are you due?
I arrived [early for an appointment] and the only people around were the receptionist and myself. We fell into conversation and she started telling me how much she hated her job. She was wearing this big flowing muu-muu dress that I took to be a maternity dress. To soothe her, I said, "Well, I guess you won't be here much longer." She said "Why not?," and I said I thought once the baby was born, she'd leave. In a very injured tone, she said, "I'm not pregnant" and I realized she wasn't; just enormously fat! --Miriam Silverberg, owner Miriam Silverberg Associates

Job interview horror stories
Morpheus, Pea Brain, Big Cheese: 13 crazy corporate titles
"My puppy got me sick" 5 craziest excuses for missing work

What's that smell?
I was presenting during a sales pitch to a Fortune 50 company. We were working on a $1B+ deal.  I asked the group a provocative question that required a little thought. It was during that lull that the poor head of treasury for the prospect company tooted. It was loud. It was rancid. And then to make it worse he apologized. I'm sure there's a place in heaven for me because I worked through the remainder of the session locked away in that small room with my firm's senior execs, the prospect's senior execs, the treasury guy and his toot without making a fool of myself and rolling on the floor in hysterics. --Lorraine Romasco

Spell-check disaster
While working in the conservative field of high-end CPA reference material, I was sending an email to a large account client regarding an oversight on our part that delayed processing. I mangled the word 'inconvenience', but my email spellcheck caught it and offered a suggested fix. I clicked accept without double-checking. And I ended up sending the client an email saying that I "apologize for any incontinence." --Weldon Adams

Yep, that's my underwear
After missing a flight back to the office from upstate New York, my manager suggested that I take a helicopter back to the office in New York City. As I stood waiting my turn to enter the chopper, the draft from the blades completely lifted the bottom half of my dress up over my head. My face was covered with fabric and my entire back half was exposed to the four men waiting in line behind me. All I heard during that short ride back to New York were snickers! --Nancy Range Anderson, founder of Blackbird Learning Associates

Email implosion
I sent an email that didn't have tags to create line breaks in the email and it went out as one block of text. We needed to send a fixed version out and an apology, so my co-founder sent a test email to make sure that it was working. He meant to send it to just me, but he ended up sending it to the entire user base. Unfortunately, he has a sense of humor and the email said "This is my test email b-tches." We sent out a "We Really Screwed Up" apology...We ended up getting hundreds of emails, but the ironic thing was 99% of them were overwhelmingly supportive -- people just wanted to let us know that it made their day, or how happy they were to know it was real human beings and not corporate robots behind their service. --Alex Schiff, co-founder and CEO of Fetchnotes

[MON4100]

Returning from the rest room at work, I encountered a young doctor in the hallway and had a brief conversation with him. I was perplexed about the strange expression on his face. When I got back to my desk, a co-worker informed me that my skirt was tucked into my underwear. OMG!

[Cube-root]

Shortly after joining an R&D team, I was tasked with determining the cause of measurement errors in an in-house designed measurement system. The problem turned out to be a design-flaw that anyone knowledgeable in the field should have caught. Some time later, my manager & I were walking along, discussing past projects & the myriad of issues we had to resolve. Not sure how we got onto the subject, but we were discussing that measurement system when I exclaimed, "I just don't get it. How could anyone who knows anything about (insert field of study) design this?" I went on. "I mean, anybody that's worked in this field for even a year should have known better." Nope - I still wasn't done. "Geez - don't they still teach that in (insert field of study) 101?"

I had failed to notice that my manager wasn't nodding his head anymore, and had become very quiet. Soon, I started to notice that my manager was not as friendly toward me as he had been in the past, although I still had no clue as to why.

Fast-forward a year or so. A colleague from a different team & I were discussing that same measurement system, as his team was now using the updated version. Offhand, I mentioned what I had told my manager after discovering the problem. My colleague's eyes opened wide as I told the story. When I had finished, he looked at me in disbelief and asked, "You really said all of that to him? "Yup." I replied. He then said "You know - he's the one who designed that setup." I replied "That, I didn't know." I immediately started to feel that icky, sinking feeling in my stomach. I flashed-back to that conversation, the visual clues that I had missed, and the change in our relationship afterward. My manager's attitude suddenly made much more sense to me. Seven years later, I am still a member of the team, and I still have the same manager. Neither of us has brought up the conversation we had that day. Unsurprisingly, our relationship over the years has remained rather cool.

[jeffreydurbin]

It took less than 5 minutes for me to research Ryan Holiday and determine that his prior job was working for infamous Tucker Max. I don't know if he intended to "out" Tucker's infidelity with his answer to this article or if it was unintended. God bless the Internet!!! LOL.

[tmittelstaed]

The "are you due" question is always risky but it would never be asked if it wasn't one of the quickest ways to build trust and reach out to a pregnant woman. I've yet to meet a pregnant woman who didn't believe that her pregnancy was the most interesting thing on Earth to talk about, and won't immediately open up when asked when her due date was. Just make positively sure that she is pregnant, and once you ask the question, never volunteer any kind of child rearing advice, even if you have yourself raised 12 kids, and you will do fine.

Besides that, it can sometimes yield some facinating responses. The "I'm going to have it naturally, without an epidural" is one I hear from the first timers on occassion and I have to work to keep a straight face. But the most fun response I got once was a description of how she and hubby had gone "birthing room shopping" that weekend, followed by a long description of all the work she had done to make it perfect. What made it fun was 3 weeks later after the baby had popped, hearing her tell everyone how hubby had fainted dead away when the head crowned and spent the magic moment on the couch in the birthing room with a nurse holding a oxygen bag on him.

[TheCareerLady]

Love it!

[jsargent100]

18 years ago, by accident, my director locked me in the building on Christmas Eve because he didn't notice that I was still working in the next office. I had to send a email to all in the company to ask if someone had the spare set of keys to let me out of the building since they were missing from the usual place. It was either that or climb out of the 1st floor window onto the roof of a parked car.

[jsargent100]

The first "When are you due" is a sackable offence. Why should a woman leave the job if she starts a family. Miriam Silverberg must be an awful person and a disgrace to womens rights.

[davedavedave11]

Not only that, her attitude toward the woman's appearance is disgusting. Miriam Silverberg sounds like a bitter evil woman --- To be fair fatty was ******** to a complete strange about her job --sabotaging her employer Mriam probably was not thinking that pregos need to leave work, but rather people who ******** to strangers about their jobs would be happier elsewhere

[DebF100]

What a feeble article. I was expecting some really embarrassing stories, but these are just the kind of things that happen in most workplaces every day.

PS. I was once asked "When's it due?" by a colleague a fortnight after I'd had a baby.

[totefrosch100]

Wow. Such tabloid journalism. Just what businessmen want to read. I miss BNET.

[micmac666]

Though fiction, hilarious nonetheless: In an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm", Larry David was coerced by in-laws into writing an obituary for his wife's aunt. The typesetter screwed up and instead of publishing "...devoted sister and beloved aunt...", "aunt" was spelled with a "c" instead of an "a". Of course, Larry was blamed.

[Michael Uhl]

After my first week on the job I sent a report of my activities - and included my previous employer on the e-mail distribution.