This Week In Awkward: 11/29

Tis the season to be awkward. Or is that just us?

Erin: Awkward Reunion

It’s been freezing and raining in Austin so I decided to spend my Saturday night doing what all the cool kids do—cooking in my apartment by myself. This necessitated a trip to the grocery store at 7:30 p.m., a clear indication of my hermit intentions. I finished shopping and was investigating the checkout lanes. I get to the end, glance up at the vaguely familiar cashier who makes eye contact with me, but return to the previous lane. After establishing my lane choice, I see the other cashier’s nametag and realize I did indeed know this guy—we went to high school together. So now it looks like I saw him and specifically ran away from him (which I am definitely awkward enough to do, but was not the case this time). I feel awkward because I’m seeing him at an unglamorous job and he’s seeing me being a loser on a Saturday night. To make matters worse, his lane ends up moving much faster, so he doesn’t have any customers and I just feel his burning judgement as I’m checking out. When I’m done I go over to say hi and we have the normal awkward acquaintance conversation, which ends with me asking if he went to our 10-year reunion and him replying, “Yeah, I saw you there but I didn’t get a chance to say hi.” This guy probably thinks I’m the biggest bitch but I swear I’m just shy and awkward!

Michelle: Primark Explosion

My friend and I went “birthday shopping” in Edinburgh last weekend—and by that I mean we splurged on some early birthday gifts for ourselves. We started our shopping trip at Primark, the source of all things trendy and more importantly cheap. After two blissful hours of wandering around and trying on clothes, we emerged victorious, paper bags full of our purchases. (Mine may or may not have included a velvet crop top.) Everything seemed to be going as planned until my friend’s bag just exploded. It started with a little tear and within seconds she was cradling what was essentially a blazer and two sweaters wrapped in a sheet of paper. We weren’t going to catch a bus home for a few more hours, so she held the package in her arms like a weird, lumpy baby for three hours as we wandered through the Christmas market and a few other stores. Maybe karma punished us for being self-indulgent…

Haley: Awkward Oil Change

My oil light came on in my little Civic, so I decided to whip it into an Express Oil Change after work on Tuesday (It’s Ladies’ Day on Tuesdays!). The problem is, I’d never taken my car there, so I had no idea what to do, so I just pulled into a parking spot, got out my handy-dandy iPhone, and Googled “How to go about getting your oil changed at Express Oil Change.” I know, I can’t believe myself either. All of the sudden I look up and there’s an employee tapping on my window. I roll it down and he asks if I need help, to which I say I just need my oil changed, and he shows me where to pull in to wait. Trying to cover for why I had pulled in the parking spot to begin with, I told him I had to answer an email and then I’d do it. The only problem was that I’d laid my phone down in the passenger seat, and I saw him glance down and read the Google search results. He just looked back at me and blinked. I rolled the window up really quickly and tried to pick the oil change lane where he wasn’t working.

Lindsey: Secret Identity

In my speech class this semester I had to give a speech comparing myself to a fictional character, and for many reasons I picked Ariel from “The Little Mermaid.” This had led to some ridiculous cases of mistaken identity over the semester. Apparently the people in my class literally think my name is Ariel. One day I was talking about an acquaintance after class. The next time I talked to him he said he’d mentioned me to our mutual friend but he couldn’t remember my last name and then I hear, “I said Ariel says hi, but he didn’t recognize the name.” This led to a awkward encounter trying to relay what my name actually was and an inability to look at my classmate’s face ever since.

Kelsey: Messaging Faux Pas of the Immature Sort

I have a three-hour long epidemiology course that’s on Monday evenings (and that I absolutely loathe). My friends and I basically sit in the class on our computers Facebook messaging and poking around on the Internet the entire time—with the occasional nod in agreement with the professor. I was reading an article on a feminist website about how to really clean discharge nastiness out of your underwear. We all have it, so it’s worth knowing, right? Well then it was saying how great it is that our vaginas self-clean and that normal discharge is actually a sign of health, versus males that don’t have that, um, cleaning mechanism. But the way it was stated was particularly hilarious in that moment and I started laughing and trying not to snort in the middle of a quiet class. THEN I sent that paragraph to my friends thinking that they would also find it funny. One apparently was so taken aback that I had sent her a paragraph that covered vaginal discharge, dirty underwear, and male genitalia in one fell swoop, that she didn’t even acknowledge it. The other friend simply responded, “oh… my…” and then also changed the subject. Cue my face turning red. Guess the article’s colorful descriptions were only funny to the immature part of my brain that peeks out at the end of a long Monday.

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How awkward was your week? Any good Thanksgiving or Black Friday stories to share? Tweet us @litdarling