Use this! Everybody loves someone who makes mistakes! Those people are steep in real life!
We complain here sometimes about how the 'happy people' are beautiful and perfect and how they have a pristine life that we can never attain. Truth is, some of the happiest people are not perfect. They get things wrong, they fail at stuff, they make mistakes, they sometimes make a fool of themselves. There's no shame in it!
I used to know someone called Chris, and he was the best friend you could possibly have, for one reason: he was really accident prone. If something embarrassing happened to you, all you had to do was tell him and then he'd tell a story in return that completely eclipsed yours.
In this spirit, please let me tell an embarrassing story that might make you feel better. I was on lunch break in my office a few days ago when the phone rang. It turned out to be a man calling from a mobile phone company call centre asking to speak to my company director. She wasn't available so I told the guy so. I get a lot of commercial and spam calls here and I was quite sure this was one, although I wasn't sure. I was quite sure my director used a different company to the one who had just called, so was about 80% sure this guy was just spamming.
I offered to take a message. He said no and offered to call back again which I didn't want, so he suggested that I take his number so my director could call back. He reeled his number off to me and I spoke it back to him as if I was writing it down (although I wasn't).
At the end, he asked me to read it back to him to make sure I'd got it right and, of course, I couldn't. He said, 'you didn't actually take the number down, did you?' and I said,
'Err... no, I didn't actually'.
He said, 'Why not?' and I said,
'to be honest, I get a lot of these spam calls (I'd decided to risk guessing that it was spam and not a genuine call) and I'm not interested, thank you', and before he could tell me off any more, I put the phone down.
I cringed afterwards, but checked with my director and it turned out that her phone's on a completely different network, so I was right.
