My dad can be obnoxious sometimes

One afternoon in my office, a student I had known for a few years made an interesting comment about me. “Mr Trout,” he said, “you eat, breathe, and sleep Marketing.”

For better or worse, that’s probably true. I teach marketing. I take on markeitng projects for local businesses. And sadly, I have marketing so in my brain now, that it’s often hard to separate it in my everyday life. Now as handy as this might sound to you, it kind of annoys my kids sometimes. Especially my daughter.

How does that work exactly? Well, here’s an example.

Once, way back when, my daughter and I had been eating in the cafeteria of a hospital. Not just cafeteria food, mind you, but we were enjoying the fine cuisine of Pizza Hut. Now I like to eat, but even I couldn’t put away all the pizza and bread sticks we had ordered. So with to-go boxes packed full, we began making our way back upstairs to the hospital room.

But as we were waiting for the elevator to come down, a terrible thing happened: I dropped a big cup of marinara sauce. Dropped. Red marinara sauce. On the shiny white floor.

At that instant, a nun turned the corner and began walking down the hall toward us. Without even thinking, I looked at her and said, “My daughter can be clumsy sometimes.”

Was that wrong of me?

My daughter just looked at me, mouth hanging open. The nun looked at me, looked at my daughter, and shook her head as she walked by.

And me? Well, how could I not feel good about such a quick PR save. And I was nothing but honest – my daughter can actually be clumsy sometimes. Of course, she’s probably not as clumsy as often as I am.

Ok, maybe it wasn’t the best thing I could have said. But really, not only did I provide a plausible (although, admittedly, untrue) statement that could explain the fact. But I also provided us a story that we’ve (or at least me and my son) have laughed about for years.

And my daughter does laugh about it. Well, sometimes, anyway.