The delicate art of the social faux pas

Everyone is good at something but it seems my something is saying inappropriate things and always having a new anecdote to entertain others with. Yes it's quite the skill I must admit.
When I was a child and somewhat on the sensitive side I used to hate people laughing at me and my siblings loved to regale my friends and others with hilarious antics of mine while I sat there with a pained expression on my face wishing they would stop. Then in my teens I hit upon something. I found that if I was the one to tell people about said incident then we all could stop and laugh over it and it felt like people were laughing with me instead of at me and it made a huge difference. It's lucky I mastered this technique because I don't seem to have managed to leave silly things behind upon entering adulthood.

When making new friends as a teenager and even occasionally into my twenties I was certain to regale friends with the story about the time my sister dared me to climb inside a tumble dryer ( I was only about 6 or 7) and she said I'd never fit inside but I soon proved her wrong.Unfortunately getting out wasn't quite as easy and once it became obvious I was stuck we knew we were in trouble. My dad was minding us but he was in his office on a call and we were under strict instructions to not disturb him unless it was an emergency so my sister wrote please don't be mad but Laura is stuck in the tumble dryer on a piece of paper and then made it into a paper airplane and sent it into my dad. When he read it he was laughing so hard he had to hang up on his client. See that's much funnier now that I've told it.

Today I added a new anecdote to my list, I have done and said many silly things over the last 30 years and some of them are things I'm choosing to not remember. But that's okay because I'm not in any danger of running out of hilarious stories because these things just keep on happening to me or I keep making them happen.

Today in Work we had a signing of for cyclist Sean Kellys book. Now I am vaguely aware of who is he is and I know what the book is called and that's about as far as it goes. Sports biographies aren't really my cup of tea. So I was covering the front till with one of the other girls and mentally counting down to my lunch as an endless stream of people made their way to the till to purchase books and other items. A lot of them were buying Sean Kelly's book and I was having brief chats with them about the signing which was due to start shortly. Then a man walks up to my till and just says Sean Kelly. I'm well used to people just barking book titles or authors at me so I point out where we have the book for sale and mention the signing when he points out that he is Sean Kelly. At this point I go bright red and mutter an apology and bring him down to meet the book manager. Then I had to suffer through a day of people laughing whenever they saw me and kind of shaking their heads. Apparently this is a typical Laura moment.

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