Fact: today, 1/5th of the people in my office happened to be wearing an argyle shirt.  Whenever things like this happen at the office, we all laugh about it.  We generally make the same predictable jokes about who emailed whom and who didn’t get emails regarding the cool-kid dress-code for the day.  Somedays, I swear, over half of us will show up in the same color.  On those days, we all get $1,000 bonuses for being crafty.

One of the sentences in the previous paragraph was a lie.

Fact #2: my feet were quite chilly today.  Because my feet were cold all day, I chose to remove my heels and replaced them proudly with a pair of socks that I wore around the office for the majority of today’s working hours. 

So at 2:00 this afternoon, the High Boss came strolling through the office at the same time I was making a cross-office trek to the copy machine.  I realized that our trajectories, his with coffee, mine with socks, were going to meet in the middle–A wide-open, expansive middle in which he could have easily seen that I wasn’t wearing shoes.  Though not wearing shoes isn’t the biggest dress-code faux-pas that a person could commit, I thought while walking toward him,  it doesn’t exactly scream, “LOOK AT ME. CLEARLY READY FOR RESPONSIBILITY,” now does it?  I mean, how grown up are you if you can’t even wear your shoes at work?

So as I was practically tripping over myself, trying to hide my feet from a man who has likely never even looked at me for longer than 3 seconds in passing, he stopped.  He stopped dead in his coffee-in-hand headed-back-to-the-caveoffice tracks, and he looked me square in the face, and said, “Sarah, that really is a nice sweater.”

I’m either going to always wear shoes from now on, or never wear argyle again from now on.  But either way, something’s gotta give.