The Wrong Shoes

This is what happens when you haven't been to work in a month, the phone rings at 4:46 in the morning and you get dressed in the dark.  I suppose it could have been worse.  They are at least the same color.  The funny thing, aside from having worn mismatched shoes, is that I didn't even notice until after I'd taken them off.  I mean well after.  I wore them all day, kicked them off in my hotel room and lay on the bed for a spell.  It wasn't until I went to put on my sneakers and sat in the chair next to where these shoes had landed.   Even then I didn't notice they were different.

Some time back I wrote about my hooks.  You may have heard of heel spurs, little hooks of bone on the bottom of your feet.  I call mine hooks because that's what they look like on an X-ray.  They're terribly debilitating, to the point where the only remedy I foresaw was double foot amputation.  Instead I wear custom molded orthotics that have rendered my disability nearly moot.

So when I sat down to put on my sneakers, I noticed one of my black shoes was missing it's orthotic.  This troubled me greatly because they're not exactly cheap.  It didn't seem possible it could have fallen out of my shoe.  I certainly hadn't taken it out myself.  I supposed my son may have found it during one of his soirees into my closet, but even then he would have had to go into my shoe and worked the thing out.  Not something a boy of 13 months is likely to accomplish easily.

So after circling my hotel room a number of times, I finally picked up the shoe to examine it closely.  That's when I noticed there was no blood relation between the pair.  I had inadvertently put on an old shoe whilst dressing in the dark.

Now, the even stranger thing is that I didn't notice.  When I first had my orthotics, I only had one pair.  I was constantly switching between work shoes and play shoes.  This got old so I got a second pair.  But during those early days, I remember once going to work and wondering why my shoes were so loose and whether my feet had shrunk a couple sizes over night.  Then I realized I had no inserts at all.

So I should have realized I was wearing no orthotic on my left foot yesterday, but I didn't because the old shoe has a thicker heel than the new one, so even with only one orthotic my balance wasn't off.  When I pulled the orthotic out of my sneaker and put it in my work shoe, suddenly I was walking crooked.

So not only am I walking crooked, I'm walking crooked for two more days.  And my shoes won't match for two more days.  And I failed to pack any t-shirts to wear during layovers.

Not my best trip.

At least I'm not wearing the wrong trousers again.