Saturday, April 03, 2004

Big head

Yesterday a bizarre and embarrassing thing happened to me.

I was having a meeting with a client in a restaurant. On our way out, I passed a table in which a lady had a baby on her lap that was cuter than shit. I stopped to smile at the baby.

"Hi baby!" I cooed.

Baby just gave me a blank stare.

"You are the cutest thing ever!" I exclaimed.

Baby stared harder.

"Can you smile for me?" I asked, as if she were some sort of trick show baby.

HARD baby stare.

"Fine, be that way!" I joked, before smiling at the mother and turning to walk away.

JUST as I was turning to walk away, one of my reading EYEGLASS LENSES POPPED OUT AND HIT THE FLOOR! No, JUMPED from my face, is more like it.

All I heard was a huge POP and then something hit the floor HARD.

"Wha...?"

"I think one of your eyeglass lenses just popped out," said the mother of the baby.

"What??!" I turned to look at her with my glasses still on my face, missing one lense.

My client rushed ahead of me and picked up the lense. "It's not broken!"

"My what?"

"Check your glasses, Jan," my client is now speaking to me like I'm three.

I remove them from my face and look at the sides and see that they are broken on one side where the lense should be, and in my nervousness I immediately exclaimed that I'm missing a screw! Help me find the SCREW! (I totally felt all Daryl Hannah in Steel Magnolias, "Nobody mooooove, nobody moooooove!")

For about five minutes I had my client ("don't worry I won't bill you for this time!"), the mother of the Stare Off Award Winning Baby, the mother's friend and two wait staff on the floor looking for my screw, while I just stood there and said, "This has never happened before!" over and over again.

And then I looked at my glasses again. "Oh. The screw's still in there!"

I think I heard groans, but I'm not sure.

My client grabbed my glasses and spent another five minutes popping the lense back in and screwing them all back in place. "You're TOTALLY getting a discount now!" I joked.

I then made several jokes about how my head was obviously too big to hold my glasses and they spontaneously blew up from the pressure. It was only a matter of time, really. I don't think she thought that was too funny.

Later, driving back, I thought it had to be the baby. She was staring at me so damn hard she broke my lens. She's all, "Oh you don't like it that I won't smile? How about THIS stupid bitch?"

Nah, it was probably my big head.