I had an embarrassing moment the other day, one of the kind where, as it's happening, you break into a cold sweat of panic and fear, realizing all-too-late that there's nothing you can do about it.
I was in a voice chat with 7 other people for our yearly fantasy football draft; actually, only a couple of us had mics, and the rest were listening. I got a phone call from my wife, so I hit the "mute" checkbox in the chat program to keep the conversation private (this is where things start to go wrong). I was talking to her for a while, sometimes about pretty personal stuff, when all of a sudden one of the other people in the chat typed a message directed to me that said "hey, that's getting pretty personal." It was then that I realized that "mute" in Yahoo's voice chat doesn't mean "mute" like it does on a telephone; it means "block yourself from *hearing* audio," not block yourself from transmitting audio. Since I had set the mic to operate hands-free (i.e. voice-activated, so I didn't have to keep pressing the talk button), and because I was sitting directly in front of the mic having the phone conversation, everything I said to my wife also was going over the voice chat for the other members' enjoyment.
The worst part, of course, is not remembering precisely what was said in the phone conversation, because in my panic, all memory of the actual content of the conversation evaporated.
Oh well; hopefully it was at least entertaining for the folks listening. At least I remembered the web cam was on, and didn't pick my nose or anything.
