Last weekend, right before we were to go to a rather large holiday shindig, I scraped my chin. Well, not really my chin, more like that area between your lip and your chin. Okay, it’s actually just below the right corner of my lip and closely resembles a cold sore the size of a dime that’s been placed in one of those coin crushers at the county fair. You know, flattened out into the shape of a deflated football. The category of deflated your ego suffers when you’re even the slightest bit vain and have a big cold sore-like defect on your face.
I asked Doc. B. if it was conspicuous and I got the old “oh, no one will notice”. Yeah, right. I tried to cover it up with some five-year old waterproof Lancôme that I bought at the Hilton Head mall to match my skin color after lounging in a deck chair from 10am to 2pm for a week. That cosmetics lady behind the counter really knew she had a sucker when she was able to talk me into purchasing a shade that wouldn’t match as soon as my tan faded and I returned to the fluorescent lighting of my cubicle. Anyway, the darker-than-my-skin-color makeup just made the scrape look like a bruise. So I washed my face, told myself it wasn’t that bad (which it really wasn’t yet) and went on to the party. No one said anything about it, people did not treat me like a leper (it really is spelled with only one “P”, I had to look it up) and the wine rep in attendance kept filling my glass. So I figured I was okay.
By Monday morning, the scrape was an eye-catching scab, but off to work I went anyway. I decided a minor facial blemish was not how I wanted to end my 5 year and 8 month record of never having called in sick. By 4:00pm, only one co-worker (besides Mrs. T.) had asked about it. People traipsed in and out of my cube all day with their eyes either averted, staring directly at the blemish, or trying with great effort to look directly into my eyes.
I just hope these same co-workers will at least tell me when my zipper is down.
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