Tea Stains and Daisy Chains: blog challenge

31 Day Blog Challenge- Day 24

20:50

Day 24: Describe your most embarrassing moment

Seeing as my time at secondary school was pretty much just one long embarrassing moment, it took me a little while to sift through everything and find one in particular. It probably wasn't actually the most humiliating thing that's ever happened to me, but I think it was on the biggest scale.

My life outside of school was also fairly embarrassing, seeing as my Dad is one of those people who takes it upon themselves to enforce the law amongst the general public. For example, one time we were driving past our church and noticed that a couple of lads were skateboarding in the car-park. Of course, he felt the need to drive right up and tell them all about trespassing on private land etc etc, whilst I cowered in the passenger seat.

I know I have SO many other stories like that, it's just that I seem to have selectively forgotten most of them, probably in order to reduce the damage.

So anyway, this particular embarrassing moment happened when I was in Year 7, during my school's annual public speaking competition. The first round involved presenting your speech to just your class, which was already pretty much my worst nightmare. Because I was super keen and ridiculously studious, I spent ages preparing my PowerPoint and rehearsing my speech about footballers getting paid too much. I remember being quite pleased with it, but still being terrified about standing up in front of my class.

Well my keenness must have paid off, as I was chosen to go through to the final, which involved presenting to the entire year in the assembly hall. To be honest, I probably wasn't as nervous then as I would be if I had to do the same thing tomorrow. I guess that was just my childish naivety coming into play!

While I was presenting, I would be standing at a lectern facing out towards my audience. I would control my PowerPoint with a little hand-held clicker, which meant that I wouldn't have to keep turning around to change the slides.

All I remember is standing up there delivering my speech and wondering why on earth people kept on laughing. I knew I wasn't one of the 'popular' ones and that half the year probably didn't even know my name, but I hadn't thought that they would laugh! I must have grown redder and redder by the second and could not wait to finish and scurry back to my seat in shame.

When I finally sat back down, probably nearly on the brink of tears, I found out that they hadn't in fact been laughing at my face/hair/skirt or anything like that. Instead, my friend told me that my PowerPoint presentation had been one slide behind throughout my entire speech, which was apparently hilarious.

That may not sound particularly embarrassing to anyone else, but I was pretty traumatised by the whole thing, so when I was picked again the next year, I refused and made the teacher choose someone else instead!

What's your most embarrassing moment?

Harriet x

31 day blog challenge