The ball

Some of you may remember this story. (Those of you who know me, anyway.) It was a couple of years ago during the summer when I was working in the restaurant La Moulerie here in Montreal. ( I thought it only fair to tell this story after yesterday's post.) A summer employee activity was planned at a park one Monday afternoon. It was a softball match. There was a cooler with cold beers which we poured into plastic cups (no alcohol allowed in the park) and we played softball for a couple hours. Serge came with and took pictures with the digital camera. He got some great shots including one where the boss took a spill while dashing to first base. This became a famous photo. Anyway it was a surprisingly fun afternoon (despite the fact that the idea of playing sports never really excites me) and we all bonded over beer and ball playing.

The following day I downloaded the photos and cropped them and shrunk them for sending to the employees. At the baseball game I had passed around a sheet for everyone to put their emails down to receive the pics. I know that some of them had slow dial up so I was careful to shrink the size of the photo before sending. (This is important, as you'll see.) So I prep the photos, and craft an email and enter everyone's address into the send field. I attach all the photos, which I have written on a paper to make sure I know which files to send. A final review and then I click send. Now, I have fast internet, but the bar showing the progress of the email being sent seemed to be taking a long time. A very long time. Shit, I thought, I must have attached a photo that I didn't shrink. Shit, shit, shit. So I wait until it's finished sending so I can verify whatever error I made by looking in my "sent" file of the email program.

I open the email I just sent and start scrolling down through the photos, all shrunk nicely for easy viewing on the page. Until. About three quarters of the way through the photos, there is a giant photo that you need to scroll up and down and side to side to see it. What is this photo? It's a close-up of something....(GASP) "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, noooooooo!" I keep saying this over and over and start rocking back and forth in the chair. This was bad, very very bad. The giant photo inserted into the mix had been taken two days prior. It was very hot in the morning and Serge was asleep naked on the bed with the covers off. He was on his stomach and his balls were sticking out under his butt, in a squeezed, very uncomfortable way. It was such an odd sight that I got the camera and put it just a few inches away from the extruded ball sack and took a closeup picture. Now, I was looking at that very picture of the close-up gonad (each hair gloriously distinguishable) that I had just sent to all the people where I work! This cannot be happening! Something slightly relieving began to happen as hotmail addresses were bouncing back the email for being too big. In all, five people received the picture (though everyone saw it as it was then passed around via email to everyone else).

At work the next day, the boss just kept grinning at me (she got the picture) and Alex the busboy came up to me and said, "Tornwordo, is it possible that you sent me a picture of a, a, ... testicle?" I didn't really like the idea that this might be construed as some sexual fetish on my part, some kind of scrotal obsession, so I told the truth. Poor Serge then became known as "The ball" and from then on when people asked about him or saw him, they used this endearing term. "So how is the ball?" they asked, "Oh, he's fine." Shame washing over me (and him) each and every time.

And no, I'm not going to post that picture here. I've caused him enough grief.