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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3213 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 21, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Please don’t ask people to take off their shoes when entering your apartment. It’s rude.

It's beyond disgusting that many Americans wear shoes in the house.

Agreed. Besides, it's unhealthy for the feet to be shod all day long.

Depends on the flooring. It's probably fine to wear shoes in this house, but you would never wear shoes in this one.

Carpets definitely make things much worse. But even in the first house you're going to be tracking a lot more dust into the rug, the couch, etc.

This varies a lot.

I've often lived in places without sidewalks, and sometimes in places with a separate "mud room." My time in Southern Europe was in villages, where we were walking around the cow patties. The irrigation got out of containment the other day, and my whole driveway was just mud, I had to pre-wash the kids' bare feet from just playing on the porch.

It's usually pretty clear if this is the case, though.

Actual sewage on the streets is beyond even what I was suggesting. Even in clean cities, the street is simply not as clean, cannot be as clean, as the inside of a house.

They are a similar level of cleanness for the sort of person with only tile and machine washable rugs in their house, who always wears their shoes indoors, such that their home, sidewalk, car, and office are all cleaned more or less the same. I do not personally like this. I've been in homes where I couldn't walk around in bare feet because the floor feels grimy, there are little bits of debris everywhere, and I didn't like it. I've also been in a home with (old, deteriorating) carpeted kitchens and bathrooms, and didn't like that either. I have no idea what the people who installed it thought they were doing. I had to wear shoes at all times for ickiness reasons. But they do demonstrably exist. It does seem to be the case that once shoes are allowed, they very quickly become necessary.

The Mud Room houses were interesting. You have to do a complicated little dance to get your boots off without accidentally stepping in the muddy puddles generated by dirty slush melting off of other boots, so there's a gradient of dirty and wet going across the space between the outer and inner door, and then navigate it again while trying to put your boots back on. One had a cardboard box with unprocessed deer legs in it.

It's not even disgusting, let alone "beyond disgusting". I don't care if someone wants people to take shoes off (your house, your rules) but this is such an overly dramatic take.

Tracking street crud all over the house (including the rugs) is disgusting, actually.

Don't even get me started on shoes on the couch or, may Allah forgive me, the bed.

I'm James Brown! Fuck yo' couch!

I am absolutely convinced that indoor shoe usage is a continuation of rural 1800s shitty construction where dust tracked in regardless of shoe usage. Suburban and high density housing actually allows internal spaces to stay clean, but between this continuation of rural habits and hollywood normalizing indoor shoe usage because sets are ugly and feet look weird on camera.

Nowadays I actually don't know anyone, even white people, who insist on indoor shoe usage. Trashy college kids who dropped roaches and butts casually on the floor have morphed into conscientious parents who love free feet, and long shall that value persist.

If you do a lot of walking on litter-laden sidewalks, sure. But most streets are not litter-laden, and most people don't do a lot of walking on any streets in the first place.

It's not about litter. It's about the ordinary dirt that exists everywhere outside and nowhere inside.

I don't in fact track in crud off the street. There isn't crud on the street to step in for that matter. So no, it isn't disgusting. My shoes are clean, not dirty.

I suggest an experiment. Buy two identical pairs of white sneakers. Wear the first pair every day. Do not use the other pair. After one week (one month), compare them. Most likely they won't look identical anymore. (It is unlikely but a possibility that you never step outside regularly cleaned indoors spaces, but I find it unlikely.)

There is dust and mud and trace amounts of grime, trash and animal life and occasionally, human life on the sidewalks. Dust is ever present outside where there are cars, despite daily cleaning of streets (which is rare). I know this because of brush my shoes approximately once in a week.

I have sometimes gotten the impression that other people, my neighbors, in roughly the same environment as me, just have a completely different experience with the ground and their shoes than I do.

I run a children's art studio. I wear brown hiking boots there at all times, because there are children stepping on chalk pastels and whatnot. Sometimes a child comes in wearing new white tennis shoes, gets a drop of paint on them, urgently tries to clean them with paper towels, and then cries about it. Every time, I find this incredibly perplexing. These are shoes! That you have chosen to wear to art studio! How is this a surprise!?! And yet it is.

Let's say that there is in fact dirt and dust I don't notice - then is it really a problem? Dirt (as in soil) is not gross, there's no reason to be disgusted if trace amounts get into your house. I don't want my floor to be covered in visible dirt, but an occasional cleaning is plenty to keep that from happening.

Not to attack you, but do you have good vision? I can see house dust, let alone street grit. If I'd just cleaned and a few people walked in straight from the sidewalk in their shoes, I would bet it would be noticeable immediately. Fortunately, my country universally regards shoes in the house as the sign of being born in a pigsty.

Yes and no. My vision is awful without glasses, but it's fine with glasses.

I admit the dry dust is not usually disgusting. When it accumulates, it becomes noticeable and annoying. How annoying, it depends on the choice of the carpets and/or floor material. In a temperate climate, there is usually something else than dry dust, too.

All sort of wet and-or sticky dirt is instantly noticeable and disgusting.

I mean, I don't want mud all over my floor either. But it's not hard to notice if one is stepping in mud and tracking it into the house. In that case I take my shoes off.

There's no mud and dirt on the streets? You never stepped into a public bathroom in your shoes?

I simply don't believe you. It's absurd on its face that your shoes are cleaner than your socks.

Mud and dirt are dirty, but they don't count as "disgusting" or "street crud", and there isn't that much of them on sidewalks or in parking lots.

I do use the bathroom at my office. But that's a single brief visit around the middle of the day. I would expect any residue from that visit to be overwritten by the subsequent hours of dirt from my office's carpet or from the sidewalk and parking lot.

No, there's not dirt and mud on the streets. And public bathrooms are (wait for it) clean where I live. Maybe things around you are just filthy where you live, but not here.

There is obviously dirt on the streets unless the place you live is entirely paved over and there's no cars depositing particles on the street either. Similarly, there is obviously piss on the floor of public bathrooms.

If you truly believe in your heart of hearts that your shoe which you never wash is as clean as a freshly laundered sock you put on that day, I invite you to take a walk around the block a few times in bare feet and see how clean your feet are afterwards.

Neither of those things are obvious, dude.

I've never met someone who doesn't believe in particles before.

Seriously, go barefoot for a day and see how clean your feet are afterwards.

I'm Irish and I wear shoes in the house. For me, people who ask me to take my shoes off are in roughly the same mental bucket as "people with no underlying conditions still wearing facemasks" and "people with their pronouns in their email signatures".

Perhaps I've finally found the source of this execrable habit.

I'm not sure what the norm actually is in Ireland, there are plenty of houses with the rule and plenty without.

It varies from house to house. In eastern europe it is almost mandatory. Unless the host explicitly allows shoes inside. Someone has to clean afterwards after all.

It is akin to smoking - if the host says - smoking outside only - that is that.

Someone has to clean afterwards after all.

People's shoes aren't generally dirty, so I fail to see why someone would have to clean.

Unlike those, whether you take or remove shoes inside of your home reflects longstanding country-to-country cultural patterns, though. In Finland, you take off your shoes if you venture further than the shoe rack expect for a come-and-go visit and that's that. Nobody would imagine comparing it to facemasks or whatever. (Wouldn't the shoe, as an object, be more equivalent to the mask anyway?)

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