A little too Vocal?
Pun intended in the title!
My embarrassing moment may have just been an unintentional promotion for this website. I cringe at the thought. I was going to use something from my childhood, teenaged years, that sort of thing, but that's expected during that age. Those don't bother me.
This next moment I'm preparing to describe, was recent and happened due to the lack of reading comprehension.
About a month or so ago, I was scrolling Instagram when someone tagged me in a writing challenge called, 'The Little Black Book'. Everyone who knows me knows my passion for writing. I talk about it all the time, I post passages, basically I get the word out there to my peers to let them know that this is what I want to do with my career. With that being said, I checked out the challenges and read that the only requirement was that you had to think of a short story involving $20,000 + a little black book. The prize for the best story? $20,000.
"That's all?" I thought. "Oh yep. I'm definitely entering."
I got right to work. I wrote about a father passing away of old age and leaving $20,000 behind. Four daughters fought for that money, and one of the girls who was known as the "Black Sheep" of the family had forged her fathers signature on the will to give the $20,000 to the family lawyer. The man was having an unknown affair with the disgraced daughter for years, and she used that as blackmail to obtain the money from him.
The day of the decision, I refresh.
And refresh.
And refresh.
Finally, I get the email!
I have never clicked on a link so fast. I checked, and I didn't win. Bummer! However, I did see my story on the front page!
"Will's Will! My story! I came in fourth!"
I cried tears of joy in the kitchen. 4th out of 9500+ entries? I ran in my room where my mother works from the front desk (Everyone from her jobs work from home due to the pandemic.) and hollered it so loud. We were screaming for joy, jumping up and down, all of that. Sure I didn't win the $20,000, but fourth out of so many entries meant that I had been noticed! I was so excited that I immediately ran to Twitter to tell everyone I followed.
I was on Cloud Nine, literally. Then I received a $4.99 charge to my bank account, linked through Stripe.
"What the? They said that the Runner-Ups got a free subscription? Why am I being charged?" I said in my head.
So I check the entries again.
"Wait, what happened to my entry? Didn't I come in fourth?"
I check a third time. There it was. What I missed the first time around.
The "Check out the top 10." selection.
I had thought that my entry being right underneath the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners meant that I had came in fourth, since it was the 4th thing I saw on my list.
I just got through telling my family, friends, everyone. So many congratulations and celebrations for something that didn't even happen.
Oh. Em. Gee.
What's crazy is the tweet is still up, my friends and family still think that I accomplished something that I didn't, and so now I'm still sitting in a cloud of embarrassment months later. I said i'm just going to delete the tweet, but then I saw a challenge about writing about an embarrassing moment and thought, "Wouldn't this story be perfect?"
Judges, choose this embarrassing story so I can tell my family and friends about my poor reading comprehension, but this time, with an actual win to match. My soul just refuses to stop cringing!!!
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