I will never forget the worst joke I told at work. I was laughing with a friend of mine who worked upstairs about how swamped we were. We were both cackling and giggling and carrying on, and I said to her, "I swear, the next person who walks in here and asks me to do something is going to get a punch in the nose. " Sounds pretty harmless, doesn't it? In fact, you're probably thinking to yourself that it doesn't even sound like much of a joke, and maybe that I'm not very funny. Well, as it turned out, you're right: I'm not very funny at all. 

I didn't think much else about what I had said that day, or even that week. I just kept on working as hard as I could, hoping that soon I would get some more interesting work to do. There had been several projects coming up at work that I had my eye on, and I was pretty sure that thanks to my dedication, hard work and willingness to do whatever was necessary to get the job done, I would get at least one of them. I waited for my boss to bring it up, but she never did.

I worked at that job for several more months and watched several more projects go by that I thought I would have been perfect for. Since I was an administrator and technically those projects did not fall in my job description, I finally decided that the only way to make sure that I was in line for one was to speak to my supervisor directly and make sure that she knew that I was interested and willing to put in the extra time and effort in order to get the experience under my belt.

I bet by now you can see where this is going

Well, when I talked to her, she looked at me with total surprise. Literally, her mouth nearly fell open with shock. She told me that she had wanted to assign several projects to me already, but shied away because it always seemed like I was so swamped and that my "attitude" indicated that I couldn't handle anything else. Well, it took me some time, but eventually we got to the bottom of it. She had heard my feeble "joke" and taken me at my word. I lost out because I was running my big mouth around people who didn't know me well enough to take me with a grain of salt, and I'm lucky that I had a boss understanding enough to accept my apology for my unprofessional behavior and assign me the extra projects I had been wanting.

Moral of the story? Simple: Watch your mouth in the office, because not everyone is guaranteed to know that you are joking.