Several years ago my family and I had the most awkward Christmas dinner. It was the year that my grandparents decided they would treat us all to a special dinner at one of their favorite restaurants.
When we arrived at the restaurant, it was packed. Completely busy, but we weren’t worried. My grandpa had made a very special reservation several days prior to have a private room for the whole family to dine in. Our confidence in the reservation was short lived as we found out the staff had made a mistake and had already given the room to another party. So instead of our nice private room, they put a bunch of tables together and stuck us in the bar. Fabulous.
So after an hour or so passes, we get our meals and we’re eating and enjoying our time. Suddenly, an old man, who was sitting in the booth behind us, falls out of his seat onto my brother, passed out. Now, the old man is on the ground, not breathing and his wife is hysterically crying (which also made my cousin cry). My aunt decides this guy needs some sort of help (he was choking) and so she socks him in the stomach! A nurse, who was sitting at the bar, yells at my aunt, runs over, pushes her out of the way and starts doing CPR and the Heilmlich maneuver. Next thing I know, paramedics rush past me, revive the old man, and roll him out on a gurney…all while we’re eating dinner.
That was enough drama for Christmas dinner, right? Probably not.  As we’re all trying to calm each other down and get back to enjoying dinner, the restaurant keeps getting more and more crowded by the minute. Apparently there was no more room to sit in the waiting area, so this strange old man decides to sit down right next to me on the booth/bench thing I was on. I was totally creeped out..and for a long time none of my family even noticed this old man sitting right next to me at our table. Finally, my grandpa saw the guy and says to him, ” I don’t think you’ve met my granddaughter, her name is Emily.” It was totally awkward. After awhile, the man left and I thought that had to be the end of our crazy night. Nope.
There were crowds and crowds of people waiting to eat. What made it worse was that the service was completely slow. My cousin didn’t even get her meal until everyone else was eating dessert. Anywho, as my family was trying to finish up dinner and dessert, an angry old man starts pacing throughout the restaurant, yelling at each table, “YOU EAT AND YOU LEAVE!” We loved that. What a merry Christmas!

Emily – CA

I remember reluctantly going early to help prepare my great-uncle’s house for his 80something birthday last summer. There was this gorgeous girl helping with the food. I figured she was around my age and I wanted to “talk” to her and possibly get her number. My trip might end up not being a total waste, I thought. She was around my aunt a lot and the way they were talking it was like my aunt raised her or something but I was sure she wasn’t her child. Anyways, this girl was really good-looking, no joke, so I finally see her alone and I muster up the courage to go talk to her. And so it went …
Me: “Hey”
Her: “Hey ”
… long awkward pause
Me: *I point to my aunt* “Do you know Aunt Flo?”
Her: “She’s my aunt”
Me: “oh … that’s cool” … another awkward pause … “I guess that makes us cousins”
Her: [with a rather sarcastic smile] “Yep”
I die a little inside, make up some lame excuse about something I have to do and quickly walk away.  I tried my best to not be seen by her the rest of the day.

Frank – Earth

A few years ago my family was in Hong Kong. We had taken the metro from one side of town to the other, on our way to the mall. We were told that once we got off the metro we were to look for Hong Kong Station, go up an escalator, and then we’d be at the mall. We had been walking for a while with no luck. So I decided to ask for directions. I went up to a lady who worked there and said, ‘Excuse me, where’s Hong Kong?” She tried to keep a straight face, and my family started laughing at me. I quickly continued, “Station! Where’s Hong Kong Station!”
I felt like a complete idiot and my family teased me the whole day. But, we did find Hong Kong Station!

Amelia – Brazil

When I was 14, I met this guy at a church camp.
I thought he was very sweet but I did not reciprocate the feelings he had for me. He would give me chocolates and gave me this plastic necklace with an ‘A’ on it for my name. He also wrote me a sort-of love letter. I was freaking out. He was my first pursuer.
Somehow he got my phone number and started calling me. He would call me collect, so my parents were paying for a phone call I did not want to take. Once he even called me at 11 PM, which made my parents pretty upset.
I remember pretty well the last time he called me. We talked for a minute or so and then he said those six words a lot of people dread: I need to tell you something. I got really nervous.
This is how our conversation went after that:
“It’s like this…… I… I… I…”
“You…?”
“I li… I li… I…”
Silence.
“I, I gotta go!”
“Me too!”

I feel so bad for him now. I say he was the first person to tell me that he liked me, even though he never actually got to say it.

Amelia – Somewhere

First of all, I am a pretty short person and I have a young face. My whole life people have thought I was younger than I actually am. So when I was about 15, my mom and I were shopping and I went to try on some clothes. In this store, they had a section for women, which split into two sections: one for adults and one for kids. After going through the quick process of getting into the dressing room, she directs me towards the right section that I’d never been to: the kids section. I was very confused. There isn’t a sign that differentiates the two sections, but I could tell it was the kids section by the much smaller stalls and bunches of five year olds with their agitated moms. I hesitated to go there. ‘The kids section? Come on! I’m 15!’ I thought. But she looked at me as if she was thinking ‘Go ahead kid! What are you waiting for?’ I went ahead to the kids section feeling very…awkward. Later I heard my mom calling for me, and I told her where I was. When she walked up, she herself was confused. ‘WHY are you over here?’ After that I was very tempted to make a shirt that said how old I was to wear everywhere I went. People were always acting as if I was kid!

Amelia – Somewhere

In first grade I was friends with a girl that we will call Candice. First grade. We went to the same school pretty much for the next nine years and never spoke to each other. I’d see her in passing and would hear random bits about her, but that’s it. One night when I was a sophomore in high school the phone rang. My dad answered, “who? Candice? Micah, it’s for you. It’s someone named Candice White.” My dad smiled at me in a sort of wink wink way. I wondered why on earth Candice White would be calling me. She had become popular and was in a serious/crazy relationship with a guy in the very popular jock crowd and only just recovering from another crazy/serious relationship with another guy just like him. Everyone knew about it. I took the phone anyway, held my breath and answered. “Ummm…hi?”

“Hey, Micah,” she said with a way too excited peppy voice.

“Hi.”

“Do you know who this is?”

“Yes. What’s going on?”

“I just wanted to talk.”

“Ummm…ok. Why are you calling me?”

“I was just thinking that we should start talking.”

“Ok…”

Realizing this was some strange attempt at asking me out, I went on to explain to her that I was intentionally not dating anyone and not going to. I had my heart set on Beth the Other Admin already. She responded with a few more sentences about how we should talk more. We never talked. We should just say “hey” and stuff in the hallways at school. Whatever. I said, “Ok…I guess.” The awkwardness continued for a month or two after this. We would see each other in the halls at school and say “hey” or “hi.” I tried to smile, but it was always a little creepy, and I was always slightly afraid of her two angry yet very cool jock boyfriends.

Micah the Admin

The results are in. They’ve been in awhile. We’ve been waiting and waiting, hoping for more votes that would put us victims of mistaken identity in the majority. It was close, but more of you have not had your gender confused, which kind of makes the rest of us feel even worse about being mistaken for the opposite sex.

Years ago my husband’s grandmother died suddenly. We drove the eight hours from Texas to Florida where the funeral would be held with Micah’s brother and his wife. To save on money we all decided to spend the two nights with “Patricia,” a nice woman who was related to them somehow.  We arrived at the house late at night. It was very big and in a posh neighborhood. The first thing I noticed was the enormous Christmas tree, fully decorated, in the living room. It was the end of April. Patricia greeted us and seemed a little out of sorts. Not unusual, I thought, after somebody close had just passed away.

She took us on a tour of the home, showing us the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, all that. She showed us the “Martis Gras” room, a sort of party room with a full bar. All four walls were entirely made up of windows and no curtains, so even the wall connected to the Christmas-tree-living-room was “exposed.” There were party decorations from a month prior all over the floor. Empty cups, busted balloons, confetti, masks, etc.  She told us it was the room where the dogs usually slept. There was dog food spilled over on the floor next to a love seat. “That’s weird,” I thought to myself. “Her house is so grand, why is she showing us a messy room?” She showed us the library next.  Another enormous Christmas tree was there among the bookshelves, half-decorated. It was in the process of being taken down, but whoever started had given up long ago.  ”That is really weird,” I thought.  There was a sheetless twin sized blow up mattress on the floor.  Huh.  And then there was a pretty little couch chair off to the side WITH A HUGE CHANDELIER SITTING ON IT. “Am I in a horror film? This isn’t right.” 

And then she showed us upstairs where the bathroom was, the bedrooms, and then she said goodnight and went to her room.  Umm… What? We were confused. Where were we supposed to sleep? And then it dawned on us… “I think we’re supposed to sleep in the crazy rooms,” one of us said. There was a single-person blow up mattress. A chair with a chandelier on it. A love seat in the window-room. No blankets, no sheets, no pillows, goodnight! Completely weirded out and exhausted from the day’s drive we each picked a room and tried to make it work. My brother-in-law and his wife got the library. We got the Martis Gras room. Micah slept on the floor on little decorative pillows and I slept on the love seat. I had brought a blanket with us “just in case” and if I hadn’t I don’t know what we would have done. We woke up the next morning and Patricia never acted like anything was weird about the arrangement. All the other guests, however, were mortified when they heard about it. Oh, and it was my birthday. Very memorable.

Beth the Other Admin

I am a video editor and my job sometime requires me to work on location.  A few weeks back, I was working on site at a country club in Palm Desert, CA.  It had been a long day, and I was preparing to wrap things up so I could head home.  I made a quick stop into the men’s restroom which was connected to the Country Club’s locker room.  When I swung the door open, I was shocked to see a semi-short, pot bellied man in his late 50s standing in the middle of the room completely naked! I told myself, “Hey, it’s a locker room, it’s normal” and I proceded to walk towards the toilet stalls. As I passed him, I for some reason felt the need to be polite and said hello.  Big mistake!

The guy took my greeting as an invitation that I wanted to talk. (I didn’t)  He proceeded to tell me stories about back in the day when he was a driver in Hollywood. (I didn’t really care) He told me how he made great money back then, but you can’t make money like that any more… all the while, he was moving closer and closer to me until he was a couple of feet away from me, and all the while he was completely naked (well, not completely… I’m pretty sure he was wearing sox and tennis shoes for some reason).

Needless to say, it was really awkward!

Michael – CA

My sister had just gone through a traumatic experience and recently come home after being away for a few months. My husband and I wanted to spend some quality time with her. Talk things over, tell her we loved her, stuff like that. We invited only two of our closest friends to join us. We all met at my parents house so we wouldn’t run the risk of running into our other friends and offending them by not having invited them.  Well, one of our not-so-close friends, “Lydia,” must have heard my sister was in town and dropped by to see her. She wasn’t someone we saw regularly, and although we liked her just fine, I  groaned and wondered how the heck we were going to avoid a tag-a-long. We kept quiet about our lunch date, but Lydia asked my sister what we were up to and there it went. Lydia excitedly invited herself (or rather pushed my sister to invite her) to come with us.  ”Well, OK,” I thought. “A lot of effort for nothing, but it’s better not to hurt her feelings.” And we really were broke back then, so we couldn’t afford to do another lunch date for awhile.  Oh well. So we go out to eat, the six of us now, not able to have the heart-to-heart we wanted to have.

Then the waitress comes back with the check.  ”Will that be separate checks?” We were paying for my sister and one of the two close friends. That was already understood before we left.  Lydia looks at us helplessly.  ”Don’t you have money” someone asks. “Yes. I have money.” Good. “Ok, so not a problem.” Wrong. “I only have a debit card.” Uh… “So you do have money in your account, right?” Did she want a freebie or what? I had no idea. “Yeah,” she replies, with a tone of exasperation. “But I only have a debit card!” This went back and forth for a little while, till we were all so uncomfortable that my husband finally decided it would be easiest if he paid for her and avoided ever going out to eat with her again. She had a full-time job, no rent, no car insurance or other bills to worry about. We were broke.  So weird. And awkward. Ugh.

This happened one more time, but not to us. But we were there. Still awkward.

Beth the Other Admin