Before I bought my first house, I lived at Mom and Dads. It was actually great. It was super close to Cleves so I could be back down there in a heartbeat if necessary and I had the whole top floor to myself. My room ran along the front of the house facing the road. During the summer months I am in the office pretty early every morning so for those first few years after I became a manager I saw some amazing things out my window as I was getting ready in the morning. Many days I would see somebody walking up or down the road from Dodds past the house before 6:30 am. It was super obvious that they were sheepishly looking out the corner of their eyes to see if anybody was awake at the Cornell house. Every time I saw somebody walking very quickly up or down that road I quietly opened one of my bedroom windows and screamed at the top of my lungs ‘YOU ARE DOING THE WALK OF SHAME AND YOU ARE SO BUSTED!!!’ The person in question would always scream and bolt. That never got old.
A few years ago the mother of all ‘Walks of Shame’ happened. It was my day off and at about 10:30 am my phone rang. I could tell it was the office calling, which is not a surprise because I don’t think a day off goes by when at least one person doesn’t call me about something, which I am totally fine with. I answered the phone to Ted’s voice, which actually was very strange and he said ‘I don’t mean to alarm you and I waited as long as possible before I called but we can’t find “Erin”’ (again I have changed the name...). Now I am panicking. Erin was a department manager and was NEVER late, not once in the many seasons she worked at Cleves. I started my usual round of ‘filling in the blanks for somebody the day after’ questioning. Yes he had talked to lots of people she was with the night before and she had gone missing somewhere between a cottage close by and Cleves. I could feel my heart racing and actually thought about when I should call my OPP friend to start getting serious about this. Ted just wanted me to know what was going on and promised he would keep me posted.
To say the next hour was a very long one would be an understatement but he did call me to say that Erin had arrived at work and was being pretty quiet about what had happened. The story about what had happened was eventually told and it went something like this.... It was getting late and the cottage she and a bunch of other Cleves staff were at was really close by. Nobody was in any condition to drive but nobody else was ready to leave yet either. She really wanted to sleep in her own bed so she decided to walk back to Cleves alone. About 15 minutes after she started her hike back to the resort it started to pour rain. She was a lot closer to the cottage she had just left then she was to Cleves so she turned around and headed back. When she got back to the cottage all of the lights were off because everybody had gone to bed so she quietly went in and just crashed on the couch in the living room.
Imagine how horrified she was when she opened her eyes the next morning to find a blanket on her while she lay on a couch she didn’t recognize, in a cottage she didn’t recognize, in front of a family she didn’t recognize....she had gone in the wrong cottage and crashed... It almost killed me to wait several days to call her and ask if Goldilocks would come and see me in my office and that I hoped the pink leather chair in there was just right!!!
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