Wednesday, May 06, 2009
I am listening to a very good talk.
This is really neat material. This stuff is important for some work I've been doing. I wish I could get into it more, but I am too distracted by the fact that the speaker has taken off his shoes and is padding back and forth in his stockinged feet. All my mental energy is devoted to not screaming, "The floor is filthy! You paid good money for those socks and now they're ruined! Get back behind the lectern and put your shoes on before you come out here!"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
14 comments:
OMG!!! You must be kidding!? I'm alarmed, I've never seen such a thing and I would find it unbelievably distracting...
how are the socks ruined?
I was in a restaurant and a woman two tables away had removed her shoes while eating.
Similarly, my food may have been the best I had ever tasted but I could not stop focusing on why someone would remove their shoes in a restaurant.
Psychologists probably have a name for this type of personality trait. Something to do with not realizing their actions are extremely distracting/irritating/disgusting. I have a feeling it is similar to those who choose to apply finger nail polish or perfume on airplanes.
sounds like some ish i would do!
tnt
Does your profession have a higher concentration of eccentrics (Dr. Bane, for example), or is it just that you act as a news aggregator for us lay folk?
Repeat after me: socks are washable.
Socks are usually hidden inside shoes, so stains don't matter that
much. (Of course, his aren't, but
obviously he doesn't care, so why
should you care? It's his fashion
faux pas.)
You can always send him a note
about distracting behavior that detracts from the effectiveness of
his talk. Or post one online...oh, wait.
Is he a visiting academic? Or a home one? For some reason this would bother me more with a visiting academic...
Perhaps you can knit him a new pair?
Psycgirl, yes. He was a visitor. I can't understand it.
Well, you should give him the benefit of the doubt: I presume he was a mathematician. So maybe he just got married and wanted to show off his socks without holes..
Maybe his feet hurt??
I have recently become more sympathetic to this sort of behaviour since starting to have sciatica attacks - even my beloved birkenstocks can be agonising to stand in, compared with bare feet, when my hip's spasming. Haven't YET shed shoes to teach, but it might happen!
I really want to know the back story on this. Perhaps the end of the semester crunch has fried his brain as much as it has mine, and he accidentally wore mismatched shoes to work? Or was wearing cowboy boots and the heel broke?
Hmmm, this reaction makes me feel somewhat freakish. I'll admit to wearing no shoes (or socks) at all for a semester, while teaching at a California university. Never bothered anyone so far as I knew, and the building was right on the beach. But then again maybe I was just oblivious and disgusting.
Hilarious!!
Seriously now, maybe he was wearing new shoes that were killing him, and had to take them off.
I've been known to slip out of my heels attending the theatre, but that's in the dark and I put them on before the lights come up.
Post a Comment