Embarrassing Moments – A grand entrance

Our company's senior managers had a meeting in Seattle. Since I operated on East Coast time and have always been an early riser, my body had a difficult time adjusting to late dinners. On these West Coast trips, I usually never slept more than four hours a night. On this day, we spent the entire day sitting in meetings with only a couple of short breaks to make phone calls and catch up on our voicemails. At 7:00 PM, everyone met in the lobby to go to dinner at a great seafood restaurant near the locks in northern Seattle.

That evening, instead of the normal Seattle drizzle, we had hard rain. Several of us rode with the mill manager from Longview in his four-door pickup. It took us about thirty minutes to drive to the restaurant, but the great food and service made the trip worthwhile. Unfortunately, the dinner dragged on until about 10:00 PM, so it was late by the time we returned to the hotel.

The mill manager drove around back to the parking lot. The only parking space available was about thirty yards from the entrance. Since the rain was pouring down, everyone bailed out of the truck and made a run for the hotel entrance. At this point in my life, I was no longer running and could only manage to walk fast. About ten yards from the hotel's entrance, I, unfortunately, stepped into a storm-drain indentation in the asphalt. It was just steep enough to cause my ankle to roll over and I went down. By then, everyone else in the party was inside the hotel and there was no one around to help. I looked for a car or anything else nearby that I could grab a hold of to help me stand up. There was nothing even close, so I tried a few times to gain enough leverage to stand, but just could not do it. I again took the time to look around and saw a trashcan near the hotel's entrance. I crawled over and managed to pull myself up and make it inside.

I walked through the hotel lobby soaked from head to foot. I casually walked by dozens of curious onlookers to the bank of elevators. When the door opened, I stepped into a mirrored elevator compartment and, for the first time, saw how ridiculous I looked. Water was dripping off me and a puddle was forming on the floor.

As the doors began to close, someone yelled, "Hold the elevator, please." Without thinking, I put my hand between the closing doors and stepped back. A man and woman, both pulling luggage, came jogging towards the doors and the man said, "Thanks for waiting." As soon as they saw me, however, they stopped dead in their tracks. The two looked at me, then at each other. The woman shook her head, and then the man said, "Thanks anyway, we'll wait for the next one."

Talk about making a good first impression!

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