The Best Thing To Say When You Accidentally Slip Or Hit Your Head In Public

Exaggerating the injury can help
cut the embarrassment.

Aside from having an accident in your pants, the most embarrassing things that can happen to you in public are slipping or hitting your head by accident like a dummy. These days the most common thing to say when this happens is “You didn’t see that.” What are you jedi? You’re not Obi Wan Kenobi, everyone saw it and saying “You didn’t see that” only confirms that you’re embarrassed it happened and sears it into people’s short term memories. The other popular thing to say is “I meant to do that.” This not a bad thing to say, but it’s been so overused it’s lost all its meaning.

Things are only embarrassing if you’re embarrassed. The thing is, people can sense when you’re embarrassed by how you react. By saying “You didn’t see that” or “I meant to do that” it’s obvious you are embarrassed and no one’s fooled. In order to save yourself true embarrassment from falling or hitting your head you can do one of two things.

1. Say something so crazy that it automatically takes the focus off what just happened.

If you can think of something fast to say that’s so insane that it makes everyone focus on that and completely forget about you just falling on your ass then that’s a great strategy. I usually like to say something like “I have both male and female genitalia!”

2. Pretend like you’re seriously hurt.

When someone sees you slip or hit your head they love to laugh and point to make you feel stupid. Well you can turn that around on them by pretending you just seriously injured yourself. Fortunately this doesn’t require too much acting talent since you probably really did get hurt, you just have to exaggerate everything. Lay on the ground screaming and grabbing your head. Usually most people will stop laughing at that point and try to help you. At that point you can usually stand up and hobble away. The only negative to this is someone might call an ambulance and then you have to lie to paramedics and file reports, etc. It can work pretty well, but I like to go with the male and female genitalia thing to avoid wasting the time of EMTs and doctors.