Most Embarrassing Moment Ever!

I live in downtown Sonoma, a small town in northern California, near Napa. You may have heard that we had a fairly substantial earthquake centered near Napa a year ago. A half-hour before the earthquake hit, I had come home from work. I'm a security guard at a small electronics firm, where the owners are spectacularly paranoid about theft of intellectual property. I, and four other guards, are on the property at any time anyone else - any employees are there. Our job has many facets, but the general idea is that the employees are not allowed to communicate what they know of our company's secrets to anyone else. We monitor their email and web browsing whenever they're in the building, we check their belongings as they leave the building, and we set traps that have never been sprung. Around 2:30, the last computer programmer finished whatever in the heck he was doing and went home. That meant I could go home. So, about 3 in the morning, I returned to my second story apartment above some retail stores in downtown Sonoma. There are about 30 families living above a dozen jewelry stores, art galleries, convenience stores, and such. My guess is that everyone was sound asleep but me. My hours are so weird, so variable, that I need to do something before I can get to sleep, and that something is masturbation. It calms me down. I love to masturbate, slowly bringing myself to the edge several times before going over and ejaculating. And that's just what I was doing, wearing not a stitch of clothing, when I simultaneously heard and felt a big boom. I mean really big. My first thought is that someone had driven a car into one of the stores. But pictures had fallen off the walls, my kitchen was a mess, and the floor was still shaking. Badly! "Earthquake," I yelled, as if there were other people in my apartment or something. I just instinctively yelled it out. And the shaking got worse. My mind overflowed with fear. I knew only one thing: I had to get downstairs and out of the building before it collapsed. Actually, it didn't collapse, but I had no way of knowing that it wouldn't at the time. In fact, I was sure it was going to turn into a pile of rubble at any second. I had to get out of there immediately. No time for clothes or anything. I think I had wanted to grab my laptop, but I didn't do even that. I just ran through the weirdly shaking doorway, down the stairs, along with a dozen other neighbors who were just as scared as I was. I was sure I wasn't going to make it, and started to fear for my neighbors too. Some of these people were really nice, and I wouldn't anything to happen to any of them. But make it, I did. After what I remember as a remarkably slow motion drunken-like run down the stairs and out the door, I was standing safely in the street. Whew! Except... Except... I wasn't wearing anything. Everyone else had pajamas, nightgowns, or regular clothing on. One guy had a blanket wrapped around his waist. But not me. I was starkers. Worse, my penis was still partially hard, and pointing out at a 90 degree angle. Now, fear was rapidly being replaced with absolute shame. What was I going to do? How was I going to explain this erection, and my general nakedness? Surely, everyone who saw me must have known I had been masturbating. The neighbors who knew me knew that I was currently single. I mean, if I could have appeared with an equally nude woman, indicating that we were in the throes of sex, well that would be better, right? Sort of OK in a way, don't you think? But no, there was only one explanation for my condition. It was absolutely obvious that I had been masturbating. What was I supposed to do now? What should I say? How should I react? Fortunately, I've always been one to keep my cool, at least to some degree. As I thought it through, I realized there was absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone masturbates. If there's anyone who doesn't, they ought to. So I was masturbating when the quake hit. Big deal. Was I in some way defective because I didn't have time to put my clothes on? Of course not! I decided to act the right way under the circumstances, and as my penis finished deflating, I just started speaking with the people around me. They weren't asking me why I was naked with an erection. No, they were asking me if anyone was injured. They were asking whether it had been an earthquake. (You'd think it was obvious, but in such times, people's minds play tricks, and some really didn't quite understand yet.) They were asking whether anyone was still in the building? They were asking what we should all do now. The streetlights were out, as was all the electricity in the neighborhood, but the moon was quite bright. Too bright, in my opinion. We heard some sirens in the distance. There was an odor of I don't know, dust, smoke, or something in the air. The earthquake had now ended minutes ago, and we were all talking with each other. There was a kind of excitement in the air. Even though we were all inconvenienced, it was also a sort of adventure, for lack of a better word. We were all in this together, and as we were to discover in later months, it bonded us residents of the building together like a big family. But I was naked, and no one else was. They were elegant people. The reason I say that is because no one pointed out the obvious. No one acted like I had done something wrong. They treated me as if I was one of them, which I was, even though I was without clothes. Just as I was starting to notice the chill night air, popping up in goosebumps all over, Mr. Fitchmore handed me a pair of farmer's overalls. Where he got them, I don't know, but I was extremely thankful. The electricity came back on, and we were back in our building by 6am. I'm sure most of the residents set about putting the non-broken contents back into their refrigerators, setting their TVs back on their stands, and throwing all the broken stuff out, as I was. Months after the incident, almost everyone in the building is so different. Whereas we used to just mumble "Hi" when passing in the hallway, we now have long conversations. We sometimes watch sports in each others' living rooms. We share dinners. We are all truly friends. And to this day, no one has ever mentioned my naked and erect situation that night.