WarmSleepy / Foter / CC BY

The good news?

The bad days have been few and far between over the last few months.

The bad news?

One of the bad days was last Friday.

It was kind of a big deal…

A relatively small “thing” … but a big deal.

And it cost me.

A lot.

In several ways.

And I will likely not live this down for a loooong time.

So what did I do?

Well… it's kind of a long story.  I'll need about 500 words to tell it properly…

And since I don't like to tell long stories here, I'll tell just enough to make my point.

I'll make the full “what happened” a separate post.

Why not post the full story first?

Mostly because the “what I did” is not as important as the “what I learned” and “what happened.”

In short, I was supposed to do a few things during the day Friday and then meet my wife's extended family at 5pm.

After I finished the few things that needed to get done during the day, I lied down on a bed to knock out a little work that I needed to get through before meeting her and her family.

This is where it all went wrong.

Next thing I remember is slowly opening my eyes to countless text message and voice mail alerts…

I glanced at the clock next to the bed…

Hours had passed….

It was too late.

I missed it.

What did I do?

At first I felt a bit like Austin Powers facing those sharks with frikin' laser beams on their heads…

Vanessa: What's your plan?

Austin Powers: First, I plan to soil myself. Then I'm going to regroup and come up with a new plan.

I thought…. maybe everyone was running late… really late… 

I called my mother.

You know… because that's what all good Greek boys do….

Plus, she was meeting us all, too, so she could give me some intel on whether I could still pull this off…..

“Let me know when everyone's there and I'll swing by,” I said… fake-casually.

“We're all leaving,” she replied.  “Everyone's on their way out.”

Crap.

I missed it.

I needed a new plan.

The new plan was to own it.

I messed up.

There was nothing I could do at that point but apologize.

So I did.

It went something like this:

I'm sorry.  I totally messed up.  I lied down for few minutes to knock some work out and the next thing I knew I woke up and it was too late.

What was my wife's reaction?

She didn't seem to mind too much.

At first that freaked me out… She should have been way angrier… most people would be.

But she knew I just messed up.

She also knew how much I had hustled the first half of the day and how exhausted I must have been.

And she knew that I would not have missed this on purpose…

So while I'm likely not going to live this one down, it's going to be told more as “what an idiot” than a “what a jerk.”

For a few reasons.

First, I owned it.

Second, it was inadvertent.

Third, messing up was now uncharacteristic.

Sometimes you just screw up.

When's the last time you screwed up?  

How about the dumbest public screw-up you've done?

How did you handle it and what was the fallout?

Share your stories in the comments… And remember, every time you comment a husband washes a dish!