Embarrassing Socks

Embarrassing Socks

I’d been on the treadmill for nearly 20 minutes and was in need of a shower. Re-joining a gym had made me very happy. Not only was I already feeling the benefits of daily exercise but it also had the extra benefit of addressing some of the ‘compliments’ recently given to me by my wife. They were nice compliments. Everyone loves compliments but when they are about your growing laundry folding or ironing skills you can’t help but feel the need to do something a little manly to re-address the balance.

I returned to the changing room and had a quick shower. I had just enough time to get dressed and cycle back to the office before I had to give a presentation. I quickly dried myself and got a fresh set of clothes out of my locker. I had almost finished getting dressed and was just about to put on my socks when suddenly…

I stopped mid movement. Something was wrong. I slowly lifted the sock I had been about to put on my foot and held it up to get a better look. I was extremely puzzled, frozen in position as my brain tried to process what it was seeing and come up with an explanation. At first glance it had looked like a normal sock; black and distinctly sock shaped. However, upon closer examination there was something very odd about the sock. It was a very long sock. Extremely long in fact and ever so slightly feminine looking.

Behind me I heard someone snigger.

Slowly the realization started to dawn on me. This sock was not a normal sock at all. In fact this sock didn’t even belong to me. This sock belonged to my wife. I was sitting in the middle of the men’s changing room at my local gym holding a pair of my wife’s sexy knee high socks.

I’d been helping my wife put away the laundry the night before. I must have mixed up the socks and then not even noticed when I grabbed a pair in the morning to change into after the gym. As I sat their holding a ladies foot under garment not only was my manliness suddenly in question but my sock organising skills too.

This situation presented me with a very difficult dilemma. It was not a dilemma about ‘if’ I should wear my wife’s sexy knee high socks (the socks I had be wearing were very smelly from my run) but ‘how’ I should wear my wife’s sexy knee high socks.

Should I wear them as they are intended to be warn and pull them up all the way past the knee? Should I attempt to fold them over neatly at the top and attempt make them a more regular length? Or should I simply bunched them up around my lower leg like 1980’s ankle warmer?

I chose for the latter thinking it would draw less attention. It didn’t. I heard another snigger. Somehow I don’t feel as manly at the gym any more.

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

17 Responses

  1. linda@adventuresinexpatland.com says:

    Or a bright pink Hello Kitty sock. For future reference, tell everyone they’re your ‘lucky presentation’ socks ;)

  2. Invader Stu says:

    Dave2 – That leads nicely into my announcement that I will be taking Invading Holland in a bold new direction.

    Alison & Linda – At least it was socks and not another under garment.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.