Being closed in a small exam room with at least one other person and one or more pets many times each day allows ample opportunity for embarassment in the course of any given day at the clinic. Stomachs growl, gas is passed - and I'm talking owners, not patients - you get the idea. You laugh it off and carry on. (For the record let me just say I have yet to emit anything more audible than a stomach growl in front of an owner, in case you're wondering - although not without considerable effort on occasion...). However once in a while something happens that there's just no good way to ignore.
Last night I was speaking with a couple about their dog's allergy problems when I happened to glance down and noticed...my underwear lying on the floor. The following train of thought thundered through my head at lightspeed : "Oh, here's the dog's toy, no wait, it's a cleaning rag, no wait this looks familiar it's got a Victoria Secret logo on the wasteband omigod it's my UNDERWEAR, WHAT THE----!!!"
Well, now what to do? Do I kick it into a corner and pretend no one has seen it? Nope, too late as I'm already picking it up and alllllmost handing it to the owner while thinking it was some item the dog brought in. Then I stopped, mentally shook myself, looked them squarely in the eye and said "ok, I'm going to explain this because I can't think of any other way to handle it."
What had happened was this: I dressed as usual in the morning - when it was fairly warm out - and went on to work. When I came home for lunch, the temperature had dropped about 20 degrees and I had to go out to the barn, so I shucked off the layers on my lower half and threw on some long underwear and sweats. When I hurriedly changed clothes to go back to work, I decided to leave the long underwear on, so I slipped the chinos on over them and off I went.
Little did I know the morning's uns were still lurking in one of the legs of the work pants.
We all had a good laugh about it - they'll sure remember me! - but in retrospect what ticked me off was my choice of apparel. I had been wearing the one pair in my drawer that most closely resembled "granny panties" - plain, off-white. Why the heck couldn't it have been the leopard spots? Or would that have been worse?
