I'm Famous!

So, I work at a large State University that employs approximately 7,500 people. That's a lot of people. And I am famous here, now. And not in a good way either. In a rather humiliating way.

Several years ago, about 7 years ago to be exact, I had a boyfriend. Not the man I ended up marrying. Anyway, one day he decided to be nice and brought me a large hot chocolate from Starbucks. Yes, very sweet (one of the few sweet things he ever did for me). I drank some of the hot chocolate; not all of it, it was very large, and put the rest on the shelf above my desk. I forgot about it. The weekend came. Then Monday came. Upon entering my office on Monday morning (I share an office with two other people), a most unpleasant odor wafted out of the room and made its way through the entire office. Unpleasant is putting it mildly. It more smelled like someone had yakked somewhere in a corner and had not bothered to tell anyone or clean it up. So, there we all were, first thing Monday morning, holding our noses and wishing we had gas masks, desperately trying to find the offending odor. It was not to be found. We ended up calling Facilities to bring in their equipment to try to locate what was causing the odor and "fix" the situation. We were starting to think that some animal had managed to make its way into the building and had died and was already starting to erode.

After about a half an hour of several employees of the Facilities office turning over every paper, every book and searching every corner, the offending odor was located: MY HOT CHOCOLATE!! Imagine my humiliation. In my defense, I had no idea that the hot chocolate was made with real milk! Come on! Who would've known! Of course, this has been a great story for my co-workers to share with new employees to the office.

But, here is where the famous part of the story comes in. My mom emails me yesterday and tells me she heard this story about a hot chocolate incident in which the Facilities office was required to come search the building. She says this story rings a bell: "Was that you"? She asks. I confirm that it was me. Turns out, a new employee in their office had just come back from a meeting for building proctors (of which there is one or two in every single building on campus), and relayed this story back to my mom. Apparently, the Facilities office is using this story in their training of building proctors to not be afraid to call them about anything because "we've had wierder calls...listen to this story" (and that's where my hot chocolate story comes in!)

Sooo...yeah. The entire campus knows my story. I'm infamous. And highly humiliated. Seven years and the story is still making the rounds. I feel like going into witness protection.

I now have an actual story to tell when someone asks the question, "Whats your most embarassing moment?" Yee-haw!