Unintentional performance art

I kind of wish I had the corresponding video for this story, but them's the breaks...

So to set the stage, I'm at work. (I work with computers, it's all very technical and clever-sounding work, but it mainly boils down to playing table hockey.) I've been sick for a few days, and I'm not feeling 100% better yet. I'm mainly at work so I can take part in a conference call with one of our remote workers, halfway across the country. He's wanting to show me and another co-worker what he's been working on, and go over the details. To facilitate this, we set up a Skype call on a laptop - so we can hear each other, and we can see him, and he can see us. Specifically, he can see me, because that's who the webcam happened to be pointing at.

So I realized that much of my duty during this conference call was to look the part - nod in the right places, furrow my brows when appropriate, laugh at the jokes, maintain periodic yet meaningful eye contact with the webcam. Fine. We talk for about 45 minutes, going over computer things, looking through code, all that fun stuff. My cold starts to take over, and my mind begins to wander - not bad, just a bit. To keep myself on task, I become more active - I twiddle my goatee, I have a drink of water, I scratch my face with my pen, then back to the goatee, and repeat. It seems to work - I'm able to follow what's going on, and conclude the meeting without missing a beat. Hooray!

However, then I visit the washroom, and as I'm washing my hands, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Turns out that I was expending too much effort concentrating on what was going on in the meeting, and not enough effort noticing whether my pen had its lid on or not. During my 15-30 minutes of face scratching with my pen, I had inadvertedly given myself a rather intricate-looking facial tattoo in blue ink. I looked like a self-decorated Maori warrior with poor motor control.

So now I'm left to wonder... Who saw it? No one said anything... Did I get away Scot-free? Or was the choked-off guffaw from halfway across the country in response to something other than my goofy thumbs-up at one point? I may never know...