Balls Deep

A quick hitter (potentially) about something that happened at work today that could have gone horribly wrong, but turned out to be funny (thankfully).

First, a little background. Every year, UBS has one Friday a year where employees are invited to participate in a series of events designed to inspire a little fun. This year, the events were a mince pie eating contest, a mini-golf around the office game, an XBOX dance off, a “name the company logo” contest, and a raffle with all proceeds going to charity. Yesterday, my team graciously volunteered me to participate in the mince pie eating contest and I begrudgingly accepted even though mince pies are about as appetizing as they sound. In order to seem more into the team spirit of the event, I brought my newly minted camera along so my co-workers could immortalize my inevitable near-public humiliation and potential stomach upheaval for all eternity (pictures on Facebook to come). During the entire spectacle, my boss is using my camera to take pictures of the festivities since I will be unable to use the camera myself while stuffing my face full of some of the most hideous food I've ever had to eat.

The rules: two minute heat, eat as many pies as you can in those two minutes one at a time. The mouth must be confirmed empty before the next pie can be undertaken. Fair enough. I am in the second heat of three and I realize immediately I have no chance in making it through to the next and final round. The top 6 make it to the finals and in order to have even the smallest chance, you need to scarf down three of these disgusting hair pies. I give it my best shot even though I have zero interest in making it out of this round and eventually choke down two of these vomit inducing pucks of garbage. The next heat involves a co-worker of mine who works directly under my boss's supervisor, so we all have a semi-vested interest in seeing him do well. My boss continues to snap pictures of the happenings with my camera which will probably eventually make their way into the company news letter or some such item.

Here's where it gets interesting. As usually happens during this type of activity, a few decent pictures get taken and the taker wants to share them with the people who might enjoy them. After going through the pictures she has taken, it comes to the end of the most recent pictures and rolls into previously taken ones. Since this is a relatively new camera (I've had it for all of two weeks), there shouldn't be any other pictures on the memory card since I have taken precisely zero pictures with this camera to date. The problem is, there are pictures at the beginning of the card and the pictures are of a shiny, hairy testicle. Two pictures, same ball, one close up, one further away. In my boss's supervisor's hands...my camera...balls on the screen. Awesome. It is at this moment I can actually hear my career getting flushed down the toilet at rapid speed. After viewing the testicle pictures, the big boss hands the camera to my line manager and says “oops...I probably wasn't meant to see those,” to which my line manager replies “that's not my camera, it's Justin's.” Even better. How am I supposed to explain how my camera has pictures of balls on it when everyone assumes they're mine since it's my camera? You can't. You can only try.

This is what I came up with: logic. Why would I ever rationally, intentionally hand over my camera to my boss knowing full well there are pictures of my own anatomy on there? Has that ever worked for anyone? “Hey, I know you said you didn't want to give me that promotion...but take a look at this! I bet you'll change your mind!” There has to be an explanation here...and there was.

Turns out, someone I know (I'm not naming names...that would be rude) thought it would be a pretty funny joke to take some full frontals after having a few drinks one night. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all about male nudity jokes...and had I not discovered the pictures in this particular situation, it would have been a lot funnier. Since it happened to be in this situation? Not quite as funny. Thankfully the bosses had a sense of humor about it and bought my explanation about why it wasn't my junk on the camera. All in all – no harm...no foul. But it could have been much, much worse.

And a friendly warning to the person(s) responsible: payback is and always will be a psychotic, mind-fucking bitch.