I was not going to say anything about this lest it upset my wife, but I am pretty sure that a lady from the Salvation Army has seen my, er, willy.
"For goodness sake though," I told my mate Orville during our game of Truth or Dare. "It was years and years years ago and I swear NOTHING happened."
Um, this is not exactly true.
As Orville said, well, something MUST have happened otherwise I would not have a true story to tell.
Well, it happened in Devonport, Tasmania, in the late 1970s. Yes, last century.
And it was perhaps the most embarrassing moment to that point of my life.
I had one of the top flats in a two-storey building.
I was 19 or 20. It was the first time I had lived alone away from home and I had a lot to learn about life and looking after myself.
I had been working in Launceston, my home city, and the boss sent to the Devonport office, 100kms north-west, for the day.
Then he asked me to stay another day. Then another.
It was not too bad. The company put me up in a plush hotel and it was nice to be away from home.
Then my boss asked me to stay for another week and I was asked to move to another, no doubt less-expensive, hotel right across the road from work, where I found, to my delight, the good news that the room had not one television but two televisions side by side.
The bad news was they were both black and white.
The worse news was that neither actually worked.
I did not have to suffer long though.
My boss decided that since I was already living in Devonport, I might as well stay there for six months.
Thus, I found the flat in Archer Street and rented my own colour TV, one that actually worked.
In fact, I was busy watching it the day I flooded the place.
The flat's washing machine was only semi-automatic and required me to push some buttons after the fill cycle.
Alas, I got engrossed in TV and forgot.
Next thing I know there was a knock at the door.
My front door was at the bottom of the stairs, just inside the real front door.
I traipsed down and opened my door to find a very red-faced downstairs neighbour complaining there was water running down his walls and his electricity had been shorted.
Yep, that was pretty embarrassing. Luckily, the landlord was an electrician.
But it had nothing, absolutely nothing, on my embarrassing moments with the lady from the Salvation Army.
I was in the shower when the doorbell rang.
I did not get a lot of visitors. I grabbed my dressing gown and went downstairs to see who it was. First I opened my front door, then the external door.
There I found a middle-aged lady from the Salvos, collecting for the Red Shield appeal.
"Certainly," I said, knowing of the good work the Salvation Army does. "I'll just get some change."
I turned, and at that moment a gust of wind whipped up and slammed my front door shut in my face. Locked shut, in fact. And I had no keys to get back in. All I had was the dressing gown I was standing naked in.
The Salvo lady turned out to be very charitable.
Not only did she go borrow a ladder from across the road so I could access my own flat through an open window upstairs, but she held the ladder steady for me as I scurried up it, my dressing gown flapping in the breeze and me hoping like heck, every rung of the way, she had her eyes closed.
"Is that it?" said a disappointed Orville.
"Yes," I said. "But I like to think I gave quite generously that day."
©November 20, 2003, John Martin. All Rights Reserved
If you liked this short column perhaps you'll like my new comic fiction novel, which has nearly 250 pages of laughs. Check out the first chapter here free