When "Fashionably Late" Gets Too Real

"I was wearing a dress to work that I had specifically picked out because it was office-appropriate but would still look super-cute on my Tinder date later. Around 5 p.m., as I was trying to get everything done to leave on time, I tried to stand up — and realized I couldn't. After some gentle tugging, I realized that the pretty full skirt on my dress had gotten caught under my desk chair. After a little more tugging, I realized it wasn't coming undone. I sent an email to another young female coworker asking for her help. After dissolving in laughter, she walked across the office and discovered that she, too, couldn't get the dress out of the chair. It had gotten completely tangled in the metal gears below the seat. I really didn't want to fuck up the dress to get out of my chair, so I wheeled myself across the entire office (and past all my coworkers), and into a dark storage room.

"I unzipped the dress, then slithered out of the chair and on the floor to undress. Then, without my body weight on the chair, I was hoping I would be able to better pull the fabric out of the metal gears. With some finagling, I was able to pull it out with just a little bit of tearing — but the whole saga of course meant I hadn't been able to finish up all the work I had to do. Which meant I had to tell my date. I was too frazzled to come up with a passable lie, so I had to text him the truth: 'Sorry, I'm running late, I got stuck to my chair!'"