...if a stranger points out that your shoelaces are untied, she is female.
And to be more specific, she is a mother.
OK, I need to explain myself. For some reason, my shoelaces are always getting lose and untied. Maybe it's because I have skinny ankles in comparison for my shoe size. Maybe I don't tie them as tight as specifications dictate... But for the 23 years I've been here on earth, my laces get untied.
Each and every person who has come up to me to alert me is a woman whom appears to be over 45 or so. I generally file this away, thinking nothing about it. In fact, I wouldn't be posting this here except for what happened in Wendy's a few days ago.
As I sit down to enjoy my soda, a woman sitting a table over warns me about my shoelaces. She was different from the other ladies from a lifetime of kindly warnings about my shoelaces. She looked to be in her late 20s or early 30s. This would appear to poke a hole in my hypothesis, except she was there with her husband and her daughter. She was busy trying to get her daughter's feet back into the pink booties she managed to escape from seconds earlier.
I believe mothers, conditioned by years of their children running around with untied or poorly tied shoes, develop a maternal need to keep the world's shoelaces safe and tied.
What do you think?