payback
26/08/2008
I’ll be the first to admit that my less than perfect eyesight has caused many really embarrassing episodes of mistaken identity. Just a couple of weeks ago, while waiting for KF to arrive at a restaurant I flagged and waved to a couple of hapless Asian American boy-men in a silver late 90s beemer (the similarities stop there) while they passed me with a look of complete terror in their eyes.
Or the other time when I smiled and waved at a friend at a very busy Hong Lim Food Center only to realise that he was acknowledging some other dude who was sitting BEHIND me. All that with a bunch of strangers at the same table. This one is debatable – since it’s hard to tell if someone’s looking behind me, so I’ll put it down to his fault, but damn it was embarassing.
There was also this time I smacked someone I thought I knew on the shoulder (I think it was at a PC Show) only to have him turn around bewildered. I don’t know what was more terrifying – that I was wrong, or that I smacked the dude on the shoulder.
Yesterday it came full circle while I was having dinner at Pasta Pomodoro. KF and I were seated near the entrance, waiting for his cousins to arrive. I’m looking at the menu, and when I look up, a preppy-casual, smug early-thirtysomething ABC looking dude with the typical Asian-American haircut, small eyes and a tan, is inching his way up to our table with a Crest-Whitening-Strip-enhanced smile. I frantically try to match his face with a rudimentary facial profile database in my head, hoping it isn’t someone from school I had a skirmish with, or even worse – someone from college I tried to hit on. No search results. Phew. I widen the query to include old classmates and co-workers. Nada.
Sidenote: While that sounds like a task that takes minutes to complete, it’s actually a split second job – maybe cos I’m so clever – and I guess it’s a human flaw, but I made eye contact with smiley subject while the split-second searches were underway. I wonder why I do that, it could been incredibly incriminating if it were really someone I knew – how else would I be able to feign bad eyesight? Anyway, I need to make a mental note to be more discreet.
So I nudge KF and ask him if that’s someone he knew.
As I did that, the confident smile began to wane, and once KF looked up and the smiley dude established immediately that we weren’t who he thought we were (ok, KF wasn’t who he thought KF was, blah, just a technicality!), he picked up his wry smile in double-quick time, turned around and slinked back to the seat he came from. Sort of like that stupid move some guys do, like they start out as if they’re going to shake your hand, but just when you extend your hand to shake theirs, they flip it up and brush their hair back, and if they’re really good, they shoot this metrosexual look of utter heowness while doing so. Sorta. Except I couldn’t see if it was a look of heowness he had. But last I saw, he was e-m-b-a-r-r-a-s-s-e-d. I bet if he had less of a tan, I’d see him blush.
That moment – though I didn’t even know the poor dude – was pretty priceless. I know this gloating is all going to come back and haunt me, and I’ll smash my personal best for Most Embarrassing Moment yet again but for now, I’m just basking in the sunshine, knowing first hand that it happens to the best of us.
