TIFU by getting my brain signals mixed up and staring at someone’s chest when they were looking right at me.

I work as a Barista for a coffee chain and the way our layout works is that the potwash is right next to the serving station, I’m usually on drive through so when there aren’t any cars to serve, I’m tasked with keeping up with potwash.

When I’m on potwash, I have to crouch or bend down a bit, so when I come back up, it’s not rare to suddenly make eye contact with someone waiting for their order a few centimetres away from me.

The following is my perspective at the time:

So it was hot in the store and outside, lots of people wearing summer clothes like shorts or tank tops, I’m just going about my business with the potwash after I finished serving a customer st the window, I come back up, wipe some sweat off my forehead and see this woman making direct eye contact with me (she briefly glanced at me).

I don’t want to accidentally zone out and creepily keep eye contact like I’ve done a few times so I immediately look down, I noticed the chest, and thought it looked nice.

I would like to note that despite my best efforts, when I see a person, I will usually do a full body scan out of habit,sometimes, I glance at the chest or ass but as long as I don’t zone out, it’s barely noticeable and I’d like to think it’s more of a biological habit more than anything else.

However, my mind went into overdrive when I started worrying that I’d creep her out or scare her, so I realised I shouldn’t be staring, then I realised this looked worse, then I looked back up, eye contact again, I start panicking and thinking to myself, “What if she thinks I was staring? What if she feels creeped out? Did I stare or glance? Am I overthinking this? I should look away”.

My plan was to snap back to the potwash after saying a quick and nervous hello to make her not creeped out, instead, my body interpreted it as this:

“Pull your neck down so fast you lift off the ground a bit and almost pull a muscle, look right back at the chest again because it was one of the last things you were thinking about, even if was in a neutral context, maintain obvious line of sight on it for a few seconds until you reboot, berate yourself for staring and overcomplicating this while you remain frozen from shock and shame, finally fully reboot to see that she is actually staring at you now”

I’m pretty sure she was staring at me because I glanced down at her, suddenly whipped my head around 3 times in a second, jumped a little and hit my leg on the door of the potwash.

This whole thing was just my brain wasting action potential on overthinking and my tendancy to space out.

Next time, I’m going to glance up at the ceiling instead.

TL;DR: Got worried about staring like a creep at work, ended up doing a full body jolt to instead stare at someone’s chest and just made it worse.