I had a client who was getting ready to put her home on the market. She followed me from room to room, questioned every move I made, made "tsk"ing noises from time to time, which slowed me down because I would stop what I was doing to address her concerns, of which there were many. Her windows were the old style 4 pane aluminum sliders, and since they were really dirty, I offered to remove them from the frames and take them outside to clean them (never again will I offer to do that for anyone!).
I didn’t have little blue shoe booties, what I had was a pair of crocs, which I switch with my outdoor shoes when I go from indoors to outdoors. I had explained that to the client, and I thought she was fine with that arrangement. That particular day, I was wearing hiking sandals for the outdoor work, so I wasn’t wearing socks.
As I was coming back into the home, she comes up and hands me a soapy rag. She asked me to clean my shoes, the crocs, which were already clean as I don’t wear them outside. I thought I had explained all this. I obliged and, as I cleaned my already clean shoes, explained, again, why I had 2 pairs of shoes in the first place. She said, “well I usually just go barefoot inside the house.”. I said, “Well do you mind if I go barefoot too?”. “That depends.” she said. “Do you have any weird foot diseases?” “Not that I’m aware of.” I said. She took 2 steps back, crossed her arms with one hand on her chin, stares at my bare feet for, oh I don’t know, It felt like 15 seconds or so, and she looks at me and says, “maybe you should wear your shoes.”
Ouch. Talk about adding insult to infection!
What would you do in that situation?