Willa did something pretty embarrasing to me at work the other day, something that I will not soon forgive her for. It all revolved around a single, innocent-seeming instant message. I almost feel like I deserved it by not being careful enough and recognizing that this embarassing situation that I’m about to tell you about had a very high percentage of happening at some point. And it did.

Here’s how it went down:

I set-up my laptop in the conference room at work a full 15 minutes before a meeting was scheduled to start with some co-workers from the IT staff and was blissfully unaware that Willa sat poised at her keyboard 90 miles north watching for that little pop-up note that tells her “Nicolas has just signed on“. I made sure that the projector was on and plugged in, displaying my desktop in a clear and very readable manner. Then I figured since I had some time to spare, I’d go grab a cup of joe and “talk shop” with whoever might be in the breakroom at the time (you gotta love watercooler talk, but that’s a whole ‘nuther post). It was about that time that a series of unfourtunate events occurred. The people I work with who were attending the meeting starting filing into the conference room and taking their seats while I blabbered on to a co-worker in the breakroom about databases and code. That was when Willa chose to do her worst.

I was a minute or two late to the meeting because of my abnormally intense bout of shop talk with my co-worker when I heard the chuckle’s and saw the large grin on my peers faces. “I think your wife is messaging you. At least I think it’s her, she called you sweets.” No way, she couldn’t have. But sure enough, right there up on the projector screen was a chat window, with a nice greeting from my wife that read:

[8:56am] Willa says: Hey sweets

The fact that one of my significant other’s pet names for me was revealed was pretty bad in of itself. And it was now a topic of conversation for the start of this rather large meeting (8-10 attendees), whoopie! I think that the fact that she pluralizes the word “sweet” is what really makes people laugh. I mean, it wouldn’t be half as bad if she had said, “Hey sweetie”. But no, she went full on and called me “sweets”.

I will probably never live this down.

[Click here to see just how many times Willa has greeted me with these words]