There was this fundraising mini-golf tournament at work last week, where every department on our floor made their own little crappy mini-course. Like for one, they just put the hole (a little plastic donut with one side shaped like a dustbin) around the corner, scattered some stuffed animals on the floor, and called it the Super Safari course or something awesome along those lines. You get the idea.

Fundraisers at offices are always very, very effective if they’re public enough. In no other stage of your life – even high school – is conformity and peer pressure more important. So when some woman I’ve never seen before in my life went around asking for the $4 entry fee, I couldn’t whip out my wallet fast enough.

So the day of the mini-golf tournament, around lunch time, I went along with like three or four people from my team to do some touring. The director of our group – the boss of my boss (aka Final Bossman) – even came with us.

Anyway, I pride myself on being something of an above average mini-golfer. I think it has something to do with the fact that I am utterly abysmal both at golf and at pool, and how two wrongs always make a right. So I was thinking GRAND PRIZE from the start. Or at the very least, showing all my fellow nerds back at the nerdery how awesome my short game was. And maybe if I beat the Final Bossman bad enough, he would be really impressed and promote me to like King Of The Bank or some other equally glamourous position.

As it turns out…predictably enough…I am really bad at mini-golf. Which was unexpected for me, because I remember going to some really lame birthday party once back in high school (tip: if your birthday party involves mini-golf, then it is lame) and completely crushing the competition. I think I made one of the fat girls cry.

…then again, all the people in my high school were troglodytes, so in hindsight it probably wasn’t all that great of an accomplishment.

Anyway, I stunk it up. Some of you already know this, but I am the worst clutch performer of all time. You put me under even a little tiny bit of pressure, and I fold faster than Superman on laundry day. I am the A-Rod of…everything. I would consistently hit amazing opening putts, only to completely fall apart once I got within like two feet of the hole. Just a completely crushing, demoralizing afternoon. The worst part was that the Final Bossman was straight up trash talking me the entire time, and I had absolutely nothing to fire back with. First, I had absolutely no game to back me up. And second, how am I going to talk back to the boss of my boss? I was completely unprepared – I hadn’t even had more than like two conversations with him prior to this in my life. Was this his way of being friendly, by destroying me at mini-golf and making me like it?

We were all sitting around at one point afterwards, and during this lull in the conversation, he just opens up with “Well at least we all learned something today. …Yak is terrible at golf.”

I mean…GODDAMN! Why you gotta do me like that, man? You’re thirty years older than me and you spent more money on that watch than I will ever make in my entire life!

I’m glad there was a double par maximum for each hole…otherwise I may still be there today, trying to close out the Hungry Hippo Hole or whatever it was called – the one with a hole on top of an incline. I only submitted my score card because I thought the guy tallying up all the scores at the end would be bored out of his head, so he would get a kick out of seeing how terrible of a golfer I was.

Fast forward a week later, and I’m eating these pancakes at work at this assembly thing, because that woman pressured me into getting golf AND pancakes for $10, instead of golf for $4 and pancakes for $5 separately. (I don’t understand it either, but I assume the math works out. I do work at a bank, afterall.) Meanwhile there’s some guy up at the front, making a speech about how everything was a big success, hopes everyone had fun, poor kids need our money, they’re dying on the streets, blah blah blah blah . Then he gets to handing out awards for the mini-golf tournament, and some bro-ish white dude wins it – I’m guessing he cheated.

And then…”With a final score only four strokes under the maximum…the award for ‘Most Honest Golfer’ goes to…Choking Yak!”

And everyone there ends up looking around, confused, because no one even knows I exist, until one or two people see me, and suddenly the entire office is looking at the back of the crowd at me, holding a styrofoam plate to my face with half a pancake hanging out of it. And I’m thinking “What the fuck kind of award is this? Is this just another unnecessarily extravagant way to make fun of me?”

“Oh Jesus Christ…did I just miss someone saying weeaboo? Am I fucked? I’m fucked, aren’t I?”

After a couple seconds of blank stares, I end up walking to the front to receive my prize – a polo shirt with the name of some company I have never heard of before stitched on the front, and a box of three golf balls “to practice with.”

I keep the box of golf balls on my desk. I took the shirt home, but it’s a small, and I don’t really know if it’ll fit me in a non-homosexual way. I suspect that they were expecting a small, useless women to win that award. Well guess what? I won. Did that blow your mind? Because that just happened.

It was awesome – I won’t lie. In fact, I can’t lie. Because I’m the Most Honest Golfer.

“Just stay out of my way or you’ll pay – listen to what I say.”
“Hey, why don’t I just go and eat some hay? I can lay by the bay, make things out of clay, I just may, what’d ya say?”