This happened a few years back, before the pandemic. I was out at a bar near my place, and a couple of friends were supposed to meet me there. (I later found out that they’d eaten some bad shrimp and had horrible food poisoning. One of them had to go to the ER for IV fluids.) I was sitting there, getting impatient with them for being late, and drinking faster than I should. I was three beers in, and feeling it, when someone bumped into me.
I turned, and it was a guy with a sheepish expression on his face. He apologized, and explained that he’d tripped on his shoelace. (He held his foot up, so I could see that it was actually untied and dangling.) He offered to buy me a drink to make it up to me. I figured, “why not?” and told him what beer I was drinking.
I could tell he wanted to start up a convo, but he was shy. I looked at his face, and you could see him going over conversational gambits in his mind, and rejecting them, one after the other. I like shy, awkward guys, so I decided to put him out of his misery. “You know I was 9 years old before I learned to tie my shoes?” I said.