did that come outta' you?

After reading Sista Smiff’s post on the Gassy Barrel, I remembered an equally funny story from my past. (By the way, the Sista is married to the bass player from The Grascals.)

It was about 10 years ago. The company I was working for was trying to get another company to do business with us. So I went with three other people (2 my bosses, 1 a fellow VP) on a trip to do a presentation and attempt to woo this company. On the way down, we stopped for lunch. I don’t remember where we ate, but I do remember the by-product of the meal for the senior person in our group. It was gas.

We go into the office building, take a ride on the elevator, and walk down the hall to the gentleman’s office. Actually, we went into his executive assistant’s office. We introduced ourselves and told the lady we had an appointment to see Mr. So-and-So. We were greeted warmly and she took us down the hall to a waiting area.

After the executive assistant left, we began to go over the key points we wanted to bring up in the presentation. The senior person in our group was sitting with her legs crossed and she had a leather portfolio placed on her lap. She held a pen in her right hand and would point with the pen as she talked. At one point in the conversation she dropped her pen. She leaned over to pick up her pen, and a something came from her nether-regions that sounded like she’d just sat on a whoopee cushion. A big whoopee cushion. One that had been blown up well past its normal air capacity. I expected to be pelted with shards of glass from the 3 windows overlooking the parking lot, because I thought the impact from the blast seemed to be enough to shatter them to pieces.

Now when guys do this, even in group settings that involve members of the opposite sex, we laugh about it. Maybe we’re a little embarrassed as first, but eventually another guy starts laughing and he gets everyone else to laugh about it. Because let’s face it, farts are funny to everyone, I don’t care who you are. But here’s where it got strange.

The three of us in the room who hadn’t just blown a gasket were sitting there completely astonished. I think our jaws actually dropped to our chests. The offender looks at us, sees our reaction and goes “Oopsy!” and smiles. She didn’t try to cough and cover it up. She didn’t try to move her chair to replicate the noise. She laid claim to it.

It wasn’t 10 seconds later that the executive assistant reappeared to escort us down the hall to our appointment. We got up and my immediate boss and I stayed back to let the ladies in the group go in first. When the two ladies had cleared the room, I put my arm on my boss’s shoulder and whispered, “Did ‘Harriett’ just ____ on us?” Fighting back a smile he said, “Shut up right now. I swear, if you even make eye contact with me during this meeting I’m going to lose it. Don’t you DARE try to make me laugh.”

We somehow got through the meeting without any other odd occurrences. After the meeting we got back in the car and started our 2-hour trip back to our office in Nashville. It was pretty quiet for the first 10-15 minutes. Then I decided to see if I could get my immediate boss to laugh. I said, “’Bob’, are we going to stop for supper before we get back? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use another good meal.” He looked back at me in the rear view mirror, his eyes shooting flaming darts at me. “No, I think we need to get on back to the office.”

We often recalled this story. I think I told it to everyone in the office over the next week. Even when someone had heard about it, they would come to me in groups and ask for me to tell it again. I think we ended up calling it “the shot heard ‘round the world” or something like that…..