Yesterday, 3 days ago, (Good Lord) LAST WEEK, I went into the city for a business meeting with a vendor. (Some of you following me on Twitter have been waiting that long for me to tell this story of my "embarassing office moment"…ooops, sorry!) Since my meeting was going to be mid-morning I decided I would stop by my “past life” work place and visit my old peeps (Damn, I miss that place). I wore a dress for my trip into the big city. I also wore what I thought were considerably comfortable shoes. I test drove them around the house that morning and they were FINE. They were black 2 inch (maybe, if that) heels with a pointy ass toe. I wore my Croc Mary Janes for driving, just to be safe and to change into later when I got back to my car in the parking garage if I did have a hard time. The key here being that I LEFT. THEM. IN. MY. CAR. IN THE 5 STORY ELEVATED PARKING GARAGE!!!! (There just aren’t enough exclamation points!!!)
I parked in a garage I’ve parked in before (Specifically the one that I parked in the day of the great power outage the summer of 2002) right on 43rd Street off of Times Square (x2). Put on my pointy ass shoes. Went across the street into my “past life” building. Went upstairs to my old haunts, visited and left about 2 hours later. By then my feet were already barkin’. But by then, I couldn’t go back to the garage, ask the attendant to go retrieve my car or my shoes for me, so I crossed x2 to get to the building where my meeting with our vendor was going to be held. It’s important to note here that I was never going to be leaving a 3 square block radius the entire time I was in the city. But by this point (ouch) my (ouch) feet (ouch) were seriously (ouch) GROWLING (ouch) MAD!!!
I made it to my meeting, and promptly kicked off my shoes and shoved them under the conference table on the room we were holding our VIDEO CONFERENCE IN!!! I’m hoping upon hope the entire time that they couldn’t see anything from the other end below the conference table level because it is not your typical conference room set up with a giant oblong conference table, it’s more of a half moon shape desk type set up with the screen and the video camera on us in front of us. Still not sure whether they saw anything below the table or not, so we’ll just imagine they didn’t.
At the end of the meeting I began the attempt of coercing my barking dogs back into the pointy ass shoes from HELL, but they were all…WOOF! And I was all…CRAP, we still have to walk to lunch a few blocks up! And my feet were not going back in the pointy ass shoes whether I liked it or not. Fortunately one of my contacts at the vendor who was in on the meeting is a girl a little younger than I am so I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask if she had a spare pair of shoes after all she lives in the city and walks to and from work every day. And as against wearing other people’s shoes as I am, I really just had no choice. (I think I just made a few people throw up a little bit in their mouth most likely at the thought of sharing shoes!)
Anyway…SCORE..she DID!!! They were Skechers, black, heel type flip flop sandal jobbies. The right shoe size and everything. And, they were new, she had only worn them once. Perfect! Except not! No, it couldn’t be that easy. My fatty fatty 2 by 4 wide ass feet (thanks Dad!) would NOT fit in her flip flop sandals. Can you imagine? As if this weren’t embarrassing enough, I couldn’t even fit in her shoes. She quickly thought again and said her friend a few cubicles over usually has a pair of flip flops and she would check with her.
SCORE again!!! Her friend did have a pair of flip flops, only been worn twice. A pair of Reefs (which are my favorite flip flops of all time, so it was perfect). And then we went to lunch. I can’t tell you how elated my feet were to not be wearing the pointy ass(hole) shoes. I kept thinking to myself, wow, this vendor is awesome, I already knew they were awesome and treated their customers REALLY (like, SERIOUSLY) REALLY WELL, but this was the icing on the cake. They would stop at nothing to help a customer. We finished lunch and the plan was for her to follow me back to my car at the parking garage, I’d get my car, and swap out my Croc Mary Janes for her coworker’s flip flops. And one would think the story would end there. But no!
The following day, I sent an email to a guy I know who also works at the company but when I was there, he was in meetings and then had a lunch appointment and like two ships in the night, we crossed paths but didn’t wind up seeing each other the day before. So I decided I would poke him via email and accuse him of hiding under his desk while I was there just to avoid seeing me (not true, but we go back a long way, that we can bust chops with each other…no harm no foul!). His reply in essence said he tried but again…two ships…night…yadda yadda…next time! And the last zinger of his email said…”By the way, what was up with you borrowing flip flops Cinderella?” As I read his words, I. WAS. MORTIFIED. It had gotten around. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, when I didn’t reply to him right away, he sent a follow up email that said, “Just so you know – the woman whose flip flops you borrowed had this nasty case of foot fungus a few days ago…Wouldn’t worry about it though – am sure it cleared up…” I called my cohort there immediately and told her she was in big trouble!!! She said, she had nothing to do with it, that, by the time she got back from lunch it was the talk of the office. ::head desk…head desk…head desk:: She had taken the heat too. Apparently upon her return everyone was coming over asking if she had shoes they could borrow. And all I could think was, it would’ve been MARGINALLY btter to just kick off the pointy ass shoes altogether and walk barefoot through the streets of x2, NYC!!!
And now, I will forever be known at my vendor as Cinderella…the idiot who wore a pointy ass pair of shoes, couldn’t walk in them anymore and couldn’t wear the first pair of shoes given to me, so then had to borrow another unknown person’s shoes. I will never…and when I say NEVER, I mean EVER!!! Never live this down!!!! This will haunt me, just like that time I was up in Saratoga with the same company, staying in their customer housing, strolled back one night from this delicious martini bar up there and took my shoes off and put my feet in the fountain in the middle of the driveway. Good times, good good times. (Also, DAMN…why do all my embarassing stories with this particular vendor have to do with my feet?
