Makes You Wish You Could Curl Up And Dye
This is a story back from when I was dating the woman I would later go on to marry. It’s also one of several incidents from my life that made me wish that the ground would open up and swallow me.
Her parents invited us both over for dinner, and afterward, we sat in their living room having a conversation. The centerpiece of this room was a very expensive, very comfy, and very white set of twin couches.
A short while into the conversation, nature called, so I excused myself to visit their loo. Once my business there was concluded, I rejoined everyone on the couch and continued the conversation. A while later, I got up to freshen my glass, and as I stood, I noticed a vibrant blue stain on the couch where I had been sitting.
Instant panic! It looked exactly like the ink from a blue pen, and I often carried pens in my trouser pockets, so I thought one must have burst in my pocket. I quickly and surreptitiously patted myself down to confirm, but to my immediate and complete relief, I didn’t have a pen, so I confidently but apologetically pointed the stain out to everyone.
Me: “Oh, no! It looks like someone has spilled something on the couch! It almost looks like a burst pen.”
Well, dear readers, it was not a burst pen, and the truth was so much worse and more bizarre than that.
As my girlfriend’s mum examined the stain, my girlfriend looked at me very funny.
Girlfriend: “[My Name], what’s that stuck in the waistband of your jeans just above your bum?”
With growing horror, I reached behind me and found a small plastic device wrapped around one of my belt loops. It consisted of a plastic clip and the remains of a bar of some sort of detergent at the other end.
After a moment, the man who would become my father-in-law guffawed and shouted:
Father-In-Law: “Is that the toilet duck?!”
The toilet duck, for those who don’t know, is a small detergent bar affixed to one’s toilet by the aforementioned clip to clean and freshen the bowl when the toilet is flushed. Quite how it had managed to get snagged on my jeans, and how it did so without my noticing, I have never figured out, but that’s exactly what had happened, and I had been sitting on it since my return from the loo.
My mother-in-law was able to flip the cushion once everyone had gotten over the gale of laughter as, thankfully, the stain wasn’t on the body of the couch. She later redyed the whole set to her satisfaction, so I wasn’t out the cost of replacing their living room set.
This incident was referenced in the speech my father-in-law gave at my wedding, but I live in hope that one day I might live it down.
This story is part of the Readers’-Favorite-Stories Of-2022 roundup!
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Have you ever served a bad customer who got what they deserved?
