Fool for a day.

I’m not sure what’s worse….. Embarrassment, or Delayed Embarrassment. No one likes being the “fool”, but sometimes you don’t even know you were the fool for hours or days later and then when you realize it, you wonder how many people knew it.

For instance, I’ve always had an issue with my pants either being too long and having more folds than a Shar Pei dog or so short that I could walk across New Orleans without getting my cuff wet.

I remember one day in grade school, one of the kids said:

“Hey Nukie, you got some white strings hanging from your pants.” Then he told all the other kids and they started laughing at me.

It appeared that my mother never cut the four threads that hold the manufacturers tag on the back waist and the worst thing was that I couldn’t do anything about it until I got home. After I cut them off, I promised myself that this was the last time that this would ever happen to me.

Then about ten years ago, I went out to lunch and had a submarine sandwich and Cracker Jacks. I ate in my car in those days so I could avoid any socializing with people at work. When lunchtime was over, I went inside and was walking around the halls when one of the technicians said:

“Hey Nukie, You got a piece of popcorn stuck to your ass!” Since then, I stopped eating in the car but the curse did not stop.

Last week, I bought a new pair of Dockers. I made sure that I cut all of the little threads off and made sure that they weren’t too short or too long and finally wore them to work. Through out the day, many people would ask me:

“New pants, huh?” Yeah, I said and walked away. I wondered why so many people asked about my pants? Why did they even care? I must have had 50 people ask me if my pants were brand new.

When I got home, had dinner and cleaned up, we went to a school function for one of the kids. While I was there, I was sure that people were staring and talking about me. I couldn’t understand it. Then we went home and I tool off my pants and discovered the solution to the mystery. It appeared that I had left on the waist size sticker that they put on the pant leg and had walked around with it the entire day.