September 8 – “Go with the status quo”

Our walk yesterday finally revealed something we had been suspecting for a few days now.  My brand new shoes … were defective.  And how did I come to that difficult conclusion?  They squeaked.  Loudly.  Obnoxiously.  Every single step I took.  It started out as just one of them.  The right one.  Every time the heel touched the ground.  Squeak.  I tried tightening the laces.  Squeak.  I thought it might be because of the wet streets we were walking on, so I tried walking across carpet.  Squeak.  I tried walking a different way to put pressure in different spots (Don’t try that at home, folks.  Not a good idea for back or joint issues).  Squeak.  And just when I had about given up on it … that would be yesterday … the left one started adding to the concert.  Squeak, squeak.  You can’t very well live up to the name “sneakers” if there is a constant squeak, squeak, can you?  So what would you have done?  We boxed them back up and returned them for a different pair. 

Now you would hope that would be a fairly easy process, wouldn’t you?  I mean, how hard can it be?  Turn in the defective pair.  Pick up a new one.  Go home.  Yeah.  Not so much.  See, we couldn’t find the same shoe in my size.  Oh, we found a different shoe right away, but it cost twenty dollars more.  Nope.  We were on a mission.  Between the two of us we personally scanned every box on the shelves that we could reach, including the stacks of boxes behind the easily visible ones.  Chris finally gave up and went for help.  Not such a good idea, either.  She found two employees stocking and asked them for some assistance.  They looked at each other as if playing a mental game of rock, paper, scissors.  Finally the apparent loser left with Chris to help us out.  She hated to take him away from his task at hand.  Oh, did I mention that the item they were stocking was … shoes?  He looked up the shoes we wanted in the computer and returned with his report, “We have two of them in stock, so they should be here.”  He started looking in the same places we had already looked, and continued until I finally convinced him (after three attempts) to please check the boxes stacked way above our heads.  He sighed at the difficult customers and slumped away to get a ladder. 

Oh, the story has a good ending, I suppose.  He never found either of the two pair the computer indicated were somewhere on the premises.  He did offer us a pair that was identical to the ones I have been wearing for quite some time now.  Hey, so much for the benefits of change in the little things.  The price was the same, and I knew they fit, so, let’s go with the status quo.  Now I’ll have to break them in a bit to make sure they know how to stay quiet …

Psalms 97:11 says, “Light is shed upon the righteous and joy on the upright in heart.”

Father, would you be with those two kids working in the store yesterday?  I guess it’s hard to get fire up about working day to day, and when someone breaks into the reverie you worked so hard to achieve, it must be even worse.  Give them a good shift next time.  Amen.