Humiliation Highway

OK so we are the kind of girls that find humiliation hilarious and our trip down to Baltimore to speak at the book festival is still making us laugh. We were invited down to kick-off the festival’s Ladies Night and were asked to speak for about 30-40 minutes about our second book The Girl’s Guide to Being a Boss. Let me say upfront that the organizers of the event could not have been nicer or more helpful and what happened was completely out of their control.

We are happy to say that we pulled a great and very enthusiastic crowd, many of whom had really solid and interesting questions. Kim and I were rambling along when all of a sudden we hear a big truck pull up next to our tent. Now, we are sitting on a stage in an open aired tent so the traffic along side of us was already an issue since we were in the middle of rush hour. So you can imagine how hard it was to talk with a truck backing up along the far corner of the tent. But we manage to speak a little louder and the crowd, like I said, was supportive and engaged so it wasn’t an issue.

A woman raises her hand and asks why we chose to use the word girl in the title of our books. In the past, this has always turned into a bit of a heated discussion. Not negative, but heated. Everyone it seems has an opinion about the use of the word girl for females over twelve. We believe that we should be able to claim words as our own and we like the upbeat and energetic…girl. So, I begin to explain this when all of a sudden we see a bunch of people in the back row shaking their heads and grimacing. I am thinking ‘wow, this is going to be more heated than usual’ when I notice that the next row closer to us is grimacing. We observe that members of the crowd are now pulling their shirts over their faces and suddenly a few people are running away. Then, like The Fog, it hits us. Raw sewage. The smelliest, most disgusting stench imaginable. The truck that pulled up? Was emptying the porta-pottys. Now, that is hilarious humiliation at its best.