Thursday.

My day started off really well. It stopped raining just in time for me to go for my morning walk. I had a brand new podcast of 'This American Life' on my iPod to listen to during my walk. While getting dressed for school, I noticed that my jeans felt looser, proof of my recent weight loss & exercise efforts.

I even lost a gold earring on the bus and had it returned to me by a friendly passenger. I couldn't believe my luck!

Then I got to class.

We had a guest speaker: some PHP genius that our teacher raves about. I figured it would be boring but so what -- all I have do is sit there, right? Wrong. This guy likes to TEACH. He likes to call kids up to the blackboard and say, "Create a new function." Like an 8 year old in class, terrified of drawing attention to one's self, I slunk down in my seat and tried not to make eye contact, and eventually some other chump went up and did it.

Then it got difficult. The guy kept barking out orders: "Class, create a function that gives us the area of a circle. (pause) Ok, who's finished?"

Jeez, slow down! I have to do PHP and geometry??? Whoa - he just typed a function that gives the radius of a circle. Crap. How much time is left until the end of class? Two and a half hours???

I typed what I thought the answer was. The guy asked us, "Did it work? Who's got it working?"

Mine didn't work. My nosy "neighbors" who sit on either side of me glanced over at my screen (theirs worked, of course). They saw that mine wasn't working and started going through my script. Then the kid who sits behind me chimed in: "I know what you did wrong! You're not browsing to the local server!" "Yes, I am!" I argued, getting more and more flustered and annoyed. I was silently pleading with everyone to just leave me alone, to please grant me the opportunity to figure out on my own what horrendous programming logic I'd screwed up in this life-threatening exercise.

Then the guy walked over, followed by my teacher. Oh god...

"What's the problem over here? Someone not getting it? Come on - this is easy stuff." the guy boomed.

So now I've got FIVE people leaning over my screen with the entire class staring at me. I wanted to die. Memories of college calculus began flooding in....

The only difference between a humiliated 8 year old school kid who experiences that and a mortified 37 year old is that I didn't start crying or wet my pants. Close, though, on both counts. But the emotions - the embarrassment, the irritation - are exactly the same. I handled it the way we have to as adults: act like it's no big deal, maybe make a self-deprecating joke, say, "Thanks everyone." and shrug it off. And then write a rambling blog post about the whole thing...

(Follow-up: the problem in my code was a missing semi-colon. Hurray! I'm not a complete idiot! )