The producer led me backstage, back through the doors we’d entered to take our seats, back through the hallway past the holding room. The producer is a few feet ahead of me, and as we walk through a door, another staffer stops me and says, “Do you have a badge to be back here?”

And this, I admit, was my most aggressive diva moment of the night. Because in that moment, I held up the statue with my name on it, looked that wretched staffer directly in the face, and shouted, “DOES THIS COUNT!?”

And I’ll concede, it felt damned good. Almost as good as I imagine it would have felt to smash in that cameraman’s head.

But then she was like, “No. It doesn’t. Do you have a badge?” The producer who’d been leading me realizes I’m not behind him anymore and comes back to fetch me. “He’s with me,” he tells the door staffer. And the door staffer is like, “I don’t care. He needs a badge.”

So I had to stand there like a fool, shamefully digging into the pockets of my wilting Men’s Wearhouse suit for the badge I’d stuffed in one of them an hour before. Meanwhile, Sharon Osbourne walks past us, no badge—and no award (just saying)—while I’m furiously reaching into my jacket for a hint of plastic. Finally, I dig out the badge and I’m like, “HERE. ARE YOU HAPPY?!” And she waves me through like nothing happened.

When I get to the pressroom, someone shouted for me to stand in the corner while they stuck a camera in my face. I had absolutely no idea what was happening. I held up my award and forced an awkward smile and gave a tiny uncomfortable wave. The camera lingered for what felt like ten whole minutes, then disappeared. That footage, I’d learn after, would be aired later in the show to make up for the mistake, but hilariously, in the background, you can hear someone say, “Who’s he?” And someone else replies, “No idea.”

A man in a suit and white-blond hair approached me and shook my hand. “Congratulations,” he said with a laugh. He introduced himself as the president of the People’s Choice Awards—yes, there’s a president of the People’s Choice Awards.

“Do you know what happened out there?” he asked me.

I laughed at first, because I thought he was joking, but then I realized he was seriously asking me if I knew what just happened.

“Yes?” I said. “The camera was on the wrong person.”

“Did you plan that?” he asked me.

“What do you mean?” I asked back. In my head, I was thinking, “What the fuck are you talking about? This is your show!”

“Oh,” he said. “We thought maybe you told the camera guy to do that.”