From the Series: Life on Dog Hill
I recall an icebreaker from a meeting many years ago where thirty participants played corporate bingo. The game required players to find someone matching the criteria on the board. Just like regular bingo, once someone had made enough matches to draw a straight line through the board, they won. After fifteen years of corporate meetings, I’m hard pressed to recall any of them, much less an ice-breaker. The only reason this one sticks in my memory is that I’ve fought so hard never to become what one participant labeled me: someone who would absent-mindedly walk into a restroom of the opposite sex.
“Have you?” the woman asked, demanding my immediate answer.
“No, never!” I said, blushing at the mere thought.
“You look to me like someone who would walk into the wrong restroom,” she said, traipsing off with a wave of her bingo card in my face.
“What does that mean?” I called after her.
But she was gone, trying to match up to another new face with a random fact that had nothing to do with the upcoming meeting. Obviously, I’m still feeling the sting.
Fast forward to present day, and here I sit. Guilty of walking brazenly into a public restroom and wondering why a man was in the ladies room as the door slowly closed behind me. Tell me it’s not so….
Once I was safely behind the stall door in the ladies room next door, I groaned. How could I be so absent-minded after all these years of focus, focus, focus?! I asked myself, shaking my head.
An hour later while driving my youngest son home after his track workout, I confessed my embarrassing blooper.
“Oh my goodness, Mom!” he said with disbelief. “Is this what I have to look forward to as you age?”
Torn between defending my mental clarity and suggesting he would surely spend the rest of his life pulling me out of men’s’ bathrooms, I reached for a point of leverage.
“You know, if I weren’t so tired from having to mow the grass I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened,” I said.
He cut his eyes over at me sharply. “I know where you’re going with this one so don’t even try!” His sly smile matched mine.
You can’t blame a momma for trying!
And, to the cute guy who acted so cool when I walked in on him… oops! My bad!
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