Potentially awkward naked moment happened to me today.

In my weightlifting days, I always changed clothes in front of people. Everyone did.  But turns out in the “real” world, outside of competitive sports, not many people drop clothes in front of others in the locker rooms.   “Normal” people apparently don’t appreciate it.

So, I took the social cues and have changed clothes elsewhere for the longest while.

But the whole showering and hiding act is just inconvenient and difficult, always fretting about showing any single potentially offensive body part and getting to work on time.

Plus, the more I interacted with triathletes, the more I realized that most triathletes were another breed of who cares type naked people.

So, because of the time crunch, my practice became: glance around quickly to see if I was likely to offend anyone, drop towel and haul ass to put on underpants.  This practice saved me all sorts of time, and if anyone saw me, hopefully they weren’t offended for too terribly long. Or if they were offended, then maybe they could appreciate my lightning speed haste to cover my buns.

Today, I had a quick swim workout.  After the shower, I did my quick look around, and saw a girl, completely clothed, with her back to me, a few feet away.  Nope, don’t know her, I thought, and I dropped my towel.

Suddenly as she turned towards me, I recognized the skirt she was wearing. I pulled my towel back up quickly. “Oh, hey!” I said.

My legal assistant. A normal person.  I had complimented her on that very skirt only a few hours before.

We are all, “Uh um, hey, uh, how was your workout,” trying to avoid the weirdness that is me standing there with essentially no clothes on.

She was clearly embarrassed.  I mean, I’ve worked here all of two months, and who wants to see a co-worker in a towel (well, most co-workers…).  But I was thinking, Oh man, you have no idea how bad this was about to be. You would have had water cooler gossip for a hundred years with what you almost saw. And, boy am I glad that I liked your skirt so much, or I would have never recognized you, and you would have turned around to be staring right at my boobs and… other things. Eeeeek. 

The folks around the firm have been in process of finding a good nickname for me.  I can’t imagine the nickname that would have come out of me inadvertently showing all my goodies to my legal assistant.

Although, I saw her in the office bathroom post-towel incident, and she said, “Oh, we’re working on a new nickname for you now.”  Super.

2 Responses

  1. Heehee, I'm laughing over here. You need to find a gym that isn't at your office I guess!

  2. I always do that in the locker rooms. That quick peek to see if anyone is watching…and the second I decide they aren't, they turn around and see me in all my glory. It's a new addendum to Murphy's Law. Didn't you get the memo?

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