Everyone saw that, Preston
Preston Troutman, a fourth-year landscape architecture major, had just made a somewhat witty remark to his buddy Clint’s anecdote about shopping for the perfect summer mandals when it happened. Troutman drew his Yoo-hoo milk box to his mouth for a sip, while puckering his smirking lips, only to stick the straw an inch north-east of his mouth. The straw was on a trajectory to meet Troutman’s flexed upper lip, when his groping mouth realized something was wrong, very wrong.
He managed to correct the mistake by redirecting the bendy straw in the right direction, but not before at least two others had seen. Poor Troutman attempted to act as though nothing amiss had occurred, hoping against all odds that no one had witnessed the shameful act.
Three people at the table were not watching when the event occurred. Two people, who were acting like they didn’t hear the remark — because they were tired of Troutman’s lame jokes — were pretending to be caught in an intense philosophical conversation with one another. (“When someone smiles at you, they’re showing you part of their skeleton. Think about it.”) One person was surfing the FriendMatch app, obviously. But Beth Rock, a fourth-year engineering major, was watching.
“What a doof!” she said when asked for a comment. “I wish I had filmed it in slow motion.”
Elisha, a third-year French major and avid YouTuber at the next table over, also happened to see and was filled with immense schadenfreude. He repressed the faintest flicker of a smile at the failure.
“That made my day,” Elisha said.
He later posted a vlog to YouTube about the incident.
“You never know what will happen on campus to turn the bleakest of week-nine days into small, radiant moments of joy. The next time the coffee stain on your shirt looks a little too much like cat pee for comfort, or the girl from your comparative literature class hesitantly gives you the old smile and nod when you flash her a big, toothy grin and a hearty, two-hand wave, remember: Somewhere out there, someone else is making a total idiot of themselves, too.”
Written by: Jess Driver — jmdriver@ucdavis.edu
(This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
