How to meet friends and influence people
It all started when I was getting dressed that day. I was home alone and I had my list ready of all that I was going to accomplish. I was going to pull on a pair of jeans and work around the house. At the time, I had a pair of white lace-up runners. I had already put the runners on. I had also tied them quite tight, and decided I didn't feel like undoing them to put my jeans on.
Sometimes as a grown up you do things that, in retrospect, you realize are simple lessons you shouldn't have had to re-learn. Lessons a two year old would know better than to try.
This was one of them.
The lesson here, boys and girls, is that jeans, unless they are wide-legged [which these were not] will not pull up over running shoes without reaching a point where you no longer can pull them up.
Nevertheless, that morning. I believed that if I gave it a really good tug, I should be able to do it. No sense wasting more time undoing my shoe to put them on.
So I gave it a really good tug and I did it.
Got stuck that is. The jean leg no longer pulled up. It was firmly stuck on my shoe. I leaned down to see what I could do to pull the leg up further.
Nothing.
"Hmm....[and a few other not-so -nice words] "I thought. " What am I going to do now?"
I made an attempt to pull the jean leg off the other way. But in an inadvertent lesson on body mechanics, I found that my leg would not bend enough that way, nor could my arms reach around that far to pull the jean leg off .
I imagined walking around the house all day with one leg partially attached to the jean and one leg flopping about while I vacuumed and waited from my husband to arrive home. I didn't even want to think about what his comment might be regarding my decision to try to thwart the fashion gods.
We lived out in the country. We had very few neighbours. There was an elementary school near by but I didn't think that would be very fair to the children to see a grown woman walking around with one pant leg on and one pant leg off. What to do, what to do?
I looked out the window and saw that my closest neighbour was home. It seemed like I only had one option. Swallow my pride and ask her to pull my pants off.
I hardly even knew her. She'd moved in a few months before that and we had nodded at each other, but certainly were not that intimate! However, as they say, 'necessity is the mother of begging your neighbour for help' so off I went.
I put a really long t-shirt on because I couldn't put any other pants on, and walked over to her house with one pant leg in my hand and the other down around my ankle, and knocked on the door. After a minute, she opened the door and looked at me with pants in hand. With a sheepish grin, I said "Can you help me take my pants off?". Graciously she agreed to rescue me from this fashion disaster.
Later, she told me that she'd been going to come over to my house to see if I would help her open a pickle jar, but thought that would be too embarrassing.
On that day, I realized that this neighbour and I had the potential to become friends. Friends rescue each other from pickle jar lids that won't loosen, and jeans that won't come off because you've done something stupid like pulling them up over your shoe.
This turned out to be a prediction that came true. Yesterday, almost twelve years later, I shared this story of 'how to meet friends and influence people' at her wedding
Sometimes as a grown up you do things that, in retrospect, you realize are simple lessons you shouldn't have had to re-learn. Lessons a two year old would know better than to try.
This was one of them.
The lesson here, boys and girls, is that jeans, unless they are wide-legged [which these were not] will not pull up over running shoes without reaching a point where you no longer can pull them up.
Nevertheless, that morning. I believed that if I gave it a really good tug, I should be able to do it. No sense wasting more time undoing my shoe to put them on.
So I gave it a really good tug and I did it.
Got stuck that is. The jean leg no longer pulled up. It was firmly stuck on my shoe. I leaned down to see what I could do to pull the leg up further.
Nothing.
"Hmm....[and a few other not-so -nice words] "I thought. " What am I going to do now?"
I made an attempt to pull the jean leg off the other way. But in an inadvertent lesson on body mechanics, I found that my leg would not bend enough that way, nor could my arms reach around that far to pull the jean leg off .
I imagined walking around the house all day with one leg partially attached to the jean and one leg flopping about while I vacuumed and waited from my husband to arrive home. I didn't even want to think about what his comment might be regarding my decision to try to thwart the fashion gods.
We lived out in the country. We had very few neighbours. There was an elementary school near by but I didn't think that would be very fair to the children to see a grown woman walking around with one pant leg on and one pant leg off. What to do, what to do?
I looked out the window and saw that my closest neighbour was home. It seemed like I only had one option. Swallow my pride and ask her to pull my pants off.
I hardly even knew her. She'd moved in a few months before that and we had nodded at each other, but certainly were not that intimate! However, as they say, 'necessity is the mother of begging your neighbour for help' so off I went.
I put a really long t-shirt on because I couldn't put any other pants on, and walked over to her house with one pant leg in my hand and the other down around my ankle, and knocked on the door. After a minute, she opened the door and looked at me with pants in hand. With a sheepish grin, I said "Can you help me take my pants off?". Graciously she agreed to rescue me from this fashion disaster.
Later, she told me that she'd been going to come over to my house to see if I would help her open a pickle jar, but thought that would be too embarrassing.
On that day, I realized that this neighbour and I had the potential to become friends. Friends rescue each other from pickle jar lids that won't loosen, and jeans that won't come off because you've done something stupid like pulling them up over your shoe.
This turned out to be a prediction that came true. Yesterday, almost twelve years later, I shared this story of 'how to meet friends and influence people' at her wedding
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