Editor's Choice: Our Most Embarrassing Moments

This week, our band of ragtag editors thought it would be a good idea to share the most embarrassing moments of our young (ha!) lives.

We hope this wasn't a gross miscalcuation. Enjoy.

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Tim L.:

I'm sure there is something far more embarrassing than this, but when I was a junior in college, a friend of mine gave me a jawbreaker just before I gave a speech in class. In an effort to be funny, I decided to pop it in before the speech, and nobody could understand what I was saying. And, worst of all, they weren't laughing, either -- just complete silence. Moral of the story: Don't ever TRY to be funny. If you do, the joke may be on you!

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Hart V.:

I was 11 years old when my father, mother and I visited Mont Saint Michel in France (I grew up in the U.K.); it's a walled town built on a rocky outcrop on a beach in Normandy, and at low tide it's possible to walk all the way around it. My folks had bought me a model airplane to fly, and one afternoon while they enjoyed whatever it is the French drink at whatever the French call happy hour, I took off at low tide to fly the plane on the beach. Long story short: I wound up the rubber-band engine and inadvertently flew the thing right into the wall where it met the beach. I ran over to get it and sloshed through what I thought I was a tidal pool but was instead what passed for sewage disposal in rural France -- I traipsed all the way through the 18th century hotel lobby before I realized what an idiot I'd been.

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Fred O.:

I had just started working in TV and was told to do an impromptu interview with the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. There was no time to prepare, so I didn't even know his name. Often, when a reporter doesn't know an interviewee's name, the reporter will ask for the proper spelling, which is an easy bluff most of the time. To this day, he probably still wonders why that wet-behind-the-ears reporter couldn't spell "Jim Jones."

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Steve C.:

In third grade I was chosen to play Santa Claus in the school Christmas play, an honor normally reserved for a fourth-grader. It meant I would be on-stage the most and have the most lines. Unfortunately, more lines than my 8-year-old memory could retain. So, while sitting up on a stepladder with a cardboard sleigh duct-taped to the side, I was allowed to keep my script down below the edge of the "sleigh." It turned out to be difficult to balance on the stepladder, keep the Santa hat from sliding down over my eyes, hold the reins to the cardboard Rudolph and turn the script pages. I lost my place and blurted out, "Oops! That's not right." It got the biggest laugh of the night and I became an elementary school legend, but not in a good way.

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Lisa M.:

Setting: High-school speech class. Assignment: Use props in a speech on free time. Plan: Bring in large, exuberant puppy as prop, charming teacher into an easy A. Reality: In front of the entire school, excited puppy knocks me over, drags me 20 feet with my skirt over my head. Result: Skinned knees and seriously bruised high school ego!

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Parker H.:

A year after our wedding, my wife and I were on a four-hour drive back from her hometown with one of her friends. Wedding gifts came up and I spoke up, "You get a lot of gifts you never wanted. Someone actually gave us a juicer, so you take gifts like that and return them and get things you want."

As you guessed, my wife's friend had given it to us. I only had to sit in the car another 90 minutes with both of them.

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Scott W.:

I was in the line to try out for "Jeopardy" and asked the obviously pregnant woman in line behind me when she was due. She looked me dead in the eye and said "I'm not pregnant."

I still think she was messing with my head.

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Mary M.:

While at a media summit at a hotel I ran into an athlete I knew in the elevator line. I followed him into the elevator, but when he asked for my floor number I realized that the elevator we were in didn't go to my floor. I made up a floor number, got off, then got on the right elevator. But the elevators were glass, and as I was on my way to my real floor he saw me in the other elevator, totally catching me in my flub.

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Arah B.:

In seventh grade, I got a perm that turned my hair so frizzy that between every class, I’d run to the bathroom and douse my hair with water to try and calm it down.

The very same week, I treated one zit by putting benzyl peroxide on my entire face. My skin responded by turning very red, and generating many more zits. Like a seventh-grade girl needs a week of this!

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John H.:

The first time I went to meet my now-girlfriend's family, they served brown rice Mexican-style. So, after eating several forkfuls, I started to feel pretty funny. Keep in mind I had just met these people and was not at all dating their daughter yet nor had I ever eaten this style of rice. Pretty soon I felt so sick that I couldn't talk and I couldn't swallow, so I went to the kitchen and proceeded to throw up on their kitchen floor after trying to drink some water. I spent five minutes outside, cleaned up and told everyone I was fine, and we tried laughing about it. I felt better and ate some salad and then tried the rice one more time. I had ONE forkful, I jumped up, went outside and threw up again.

It was a great start!

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Rick E.:

Granted, I have enough weird moments to fill a book, but here's my favorite.

Back in my 20s, I had been dating this girl for a couple of years. We had discussed getting married, and after a long stretch out of town (this was the beginning of my stand-up comedy career), I returned home just before the holidays. She was still in college, living with her mom when she wasn't with me, and she convinced me that I needed to go out and buy lots of Christmas stuff for my apartment. We put it all up, then she informed me she had met someone at work and needed "space." I got very drunk and woke up in the morning to find that I had pushed all the new decorations (including the tree) out the front window of my third-story walkup.

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Jennifer J.:

When I was a high school senior, some friends and I decided to go to Clearwater Beach, Fla., to act grown up with the college kids. Bad idea.

While we were walking along the beachfront, in front of a large hotel with college students getting drunk on their balconies, someone yelled down, "So, high schools are on break too?" The hotel balconies roared with laughter at our expense. I still haven't fully recovered.

OK, it's not the most embarrassing moment, but the only one fully vetted to be shared with co-workers.

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Laura K.:

When I was a junior in high school, I made a dress for the prom. It was very cute: red satin with straps that criss-crossed on my back a few times before tying. During the dance, my date and I were jitterbugging, and I was spinning really fast. All at once, my date was covering his face, yelling, "Your dress, your dress!" Those pretty satiny straps had loosened, and the front of my dress slipped down far enough to give everyone an eyeful.

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Brian H.:

Not pretty but true!

At a restaurant, I was once caught using a handicapped restroom stall by a man in a wheelchair. But no matter how I tried I couldn't speed up the process, which left him howling mad. When I exited many minutes later I noticed his disapproving scowl and his restaurant uniform. I left and have never been back, for fear of having my food tampered with.

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McKenzie W.:

This occurred while I was in 10th grade.

I went out with my friend's brother. He was so cute.

Of course I was wearing brand new jeans for our date to the mall.

After I returned home, I realized that I had a size sticker down my right leg and a giant (five inch by five inch) tag on the rear pocket, which I must have missed as I removed the price tag.

Needless to say, he never called again.

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Doug F.:

I was covering a complicated civil trial in Duluth one day for good old WDIO-TV. The verdict wasn't in yet, so I knew what I was going to say. Thirty seconds before airtime, the photographer (the beloved Lee Wall) tells me the verdict was in, and what it all meant. Being freaked out, I didn't retain one thing he said, and proceeded to stammer for the next two minutes, wishing I were dead. I got a real dirty look from the news director when I went back to the station.

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And finally, Dave M., who tells us of his network television debut:

Lee Wall! I have a funny Lee Wall story.

I was a senior in college and the weekend assignment editor/producer at KARE (Minneapolis). The Special Olympics were in town, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and some Kennedys were there for the ceremonies. (The Kennedys are involved as patrons or something.)

The "Weekend Today" show had called up asking me to have one of our reporters do a feature for their show the next morning. I had agreed, but in the meantime both reporters I had on staff were busted from their assignments to cover some big breaking news thing. (I think it might have been David Brom... I can't remember. I know it was a murder of some kind up around St. Cloud.) Of course the entire skeleton weekend crew was all messed up and the Special Olympics got busted to a vo/sot (anchor reading over video, with a soundbite) that Lee (freelance at the time) had shot earlier in the day.

The "Today" show called later on in the evening to set up a feed, and of course they completely freaked out when I told them that I had no reporter to turn a piece for them. (Maria Shriver was a "Dateline" host at the time.) So I said I'd get something scripted and have an anchor track it. But given the spot news situation with live shots, etc. for 10 p.m., I didn't even have time to look at tapes until after the newscast. The anchor wasn't sticking around for me to review tapes and write a package. So I went ahead and scripted it and faxed (faxed!) it to New York for approval. They signed off on it, I tracked it, Lee (who was now on like 16 hours of OT) edited it, I fed it at like 4 a.m., and that's how I made my network television debut!