I’m on a work conference call and I usually dial in via my laptop. I always, always, always check to make sure that the mic is on MUTE. As it turns out, the ‘mute’ click didn’t work. This, despite me double and triple checking. It simply wasn’t going to comply – but, I honestly thought it did!

That dirty rotten mic scoundrel. And, just my luck, too.

Everything is going along fine and I’m not saying or doing anything so I don’t notice and neither do the other 50 people on the call.

That is…until…

My phone rings.

I promptly put mute my laptop speakers (THEY are working just fine, thank you very much) and carry on with my call. I ‘could’ have disengaged from the conference call with work (and really I would have missed nothing) but I didn’t. What we SHOULD have done and actually DID, in life, often give us all sorts of insight into why we do or don’t do things.

Anyway. I fucked up and didn’t log off when I should have and because my speakers were muted just fine, I didn’t hear the screaming and yelling from the speakers telling me to hang the hell up.

Damn it.

Seconds later, when the call ends, my boss’s boss chides me like a naughty 5^th grader and all I can do in my head is wonder how the hell the mic didn’t mute when I was SOOOO sure that it did. Really, he was pissed and all I can think of is: I’m SURE I muted it, how could this happen?

He went on and on and I think he may have thought I was lying. I’m not sure what that would have accomplished as why wouldn’t I mute my mic?

“It was very disruptive.” he says.

“Yes,” I thought… “I bet it was!”

I can imagine there were a lot of pissed off people for approx. 5 min of today. I can imagine that had ‘I’ been on that call, I would have wanted to reach out and slap that person! But hey…now I’ll be much more understanding. I’m sure this is my lesson. I’d have rolled my eyes at ‘me’ …had I not been ME and didn’t realize what was going on.

Even though I’d apologized 3 x (4 in total) at one point, the Big Boss still felt he needed to drive his point home. I’m not sure what that point was because once I realized this error, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s NEVER going to EVER happen again. I can see if I were a repeat offender but I’m not.

As well, can we do anything about it now? No. Just tell me what happened so that I don’t make this mistake again. I get it, it wasn’t a good thing but it wasn’t horrible, either. I didn’t shoot anyone – I made a human error.

Bawling me out isn’t going to make one bit of difference because he knows I’m already embarrassed and seeing as I apologized many times, he knows I’m regretful.

Then (after the FORTH apology) he says….have a great rest of your day. I told him seeing as I wasn’t going to be on any further WebEx conference calls, I suspected that I would. I don’t think he found that funny…

So yeah, THAT happened.