I left the house during a massive hail storm because the teenager had broken her glasses and they needed fixing.
When I left the house it wasn’t so bad. Yet. By the time I was a mile away the van in front of me nearly slid into the street sign at a round about where the rounding was clearly not happening. When I saw that I thought I should probably just turn around and go home before this gets worse. But, I decided to press on, hail be damned. Mind you, I’ve never actually seen hail like this. It was borderline Biblical. So I slipped and slid and spun out but finally made it to my destination.
Walking from the car to the building I got pelted with hail the size of chick peas and in the 30 or so seconds it took me to get in the door, one whole side of me was covered in melting ice. Awesome. At least I wasn’t trying to impress anyone…
I walk in, tell the receptionist what I needed, she instructs me to have a seat and a technician will be with me in a moment. As I was sitting, another woman showed up with the same problem and was instructed to sit. So there we sat, making small talk about how horrid the roads were and how stupid we were to actually be driving on them when really NOTHING was so important that it was worth risking your life in a massive hail storm for.
The technician, who had begun working on the glasses I brought, then started asking how bad the roads really were so the two of us started to fill her in. Accidents everywhere, you’d be silly to go anywhere unless it was really important, etc, etc.
Technician says, “well that sucks! I have a pair of shoes on hold that I found last night that I need to go pick up”. Then describes the shoe, something Jessica Simpson brand, huge heel, brightly colored, platform, pretty much everything you’d want in a shoe for spring.
The second woman that was waiting and I both look at each other and almost in unison say, “oh, well it’s not really THAT bad, I mean, if you drive slow you should be fine” and a plethora of reasons that it’s actually NOT that bad started flowing from our mouths.
Once we finished up making excuses for the weather and downplaying what we had just reported on road conditions all three of us started laughing because just like that, three women who had all just met, had formed a momentary bond over a pair of shoes.
