When I was 16...
...I was just about emerging from that gawky awkward, frizzy ginger-haired phase that had plagued me for the previous 15 years, and I also got my first job as a Saturday assistant at Clarkes shoe shop in Gillingham.

It was a tiny little shop that I used to get served in for school shoes throughout my youth. We couldn't afford those fancy machines that measure kiddie's feet automatically, so we had to use those yee ancient measuring blocks where you have to move the bar down and yank a strip of measuring tape across the foot to get the width. You know the things I'm talking about. Now they're normall only used for kiddies and the occasional dim adult who can't remember their size.

HOWEVER, one day a truly enormous man enters the shop. Imagine Andre the Giant's slightly shorter, fatter, metal fan brother. He was a great chunk of a fellow who had wondered in with his chum (why they were browsing for shoes in dainty little Clarkes I have no idea). I think he'd spotted a pair of big ole boots in the sale and quoth he, "Ooh I've got no idea what size I am, ere, do you think you could measure me."

Of course muggins here is the one left to do the job while colleagues run and hide and possibly laugh. His feet were like heaving great slabs of sweaty ham, slapped onto the puny measuring block. Like trying to measure a blue whale with the measuring tape you sometimes get in a cracker.

Anywho his feet hang off the edges of the measuring block and they're kind of sweating and breathing as if they are seperate organisms from his body. I end up guessing that he is about a size 14 as his toes poke off the end of the scale and his width is a double H or something. Pure guess, I was just desperate to get away from them.

He was actually quite a nice bloke and I think he felt slightly embrassed to be getting his feet measured by the scrawny little shop girl. I think chiropodists are a bit kinky...
(Eldoofus, Fri 5 Sep 2008, 15:10, 1 reply)

I used to love getting my feet measured as a kid!
Didn't think they still did it anymore - I thought it went out of fashion or something. Mind you - now I think back on it, it was only Clarks shops that did it, so this may be the reason for not seeing it in adult life.

*clicky* for the use of Andre the giant!
(Nogin the Nog is the good one! Beware Nogbad the Bad!, Fri 5 Sep 2008, 15:37, closed)