The Story of the Red Socks

This is an old story, but I had a little chuckle remembering it and thought I would share. My friend Grace recently emailed me about group projects. I was a marketing major in college, so this email stirred up a lot of deeply hidden shit.

Junior year, I took Marketing 301. This class, like many other marketing classes, was kind of a joke. The grade was based on three tests and one group project. All of the tests were derivatives of previous tests that the professor had given in his prior years of teaching. All of his prior tests were posted online. So, you do the math. Yes, that's right, basically you could just look at the old tests and figure out what the questions would be. Almost everyone got an A.

The snaggletooth here was the group project. You had to do an analysis of a company, and the grade was based on a group paper, group presentation and then how the other people in the group evaluated your participation. I got into this awful group of people. They only wanted to meet on Sunday nights. I was unavailable on Sunday nights and even after explaining this to the people, they were like, well, we are still meeting on Sunday nights. Awesome. There goes my group evaluation score.

All in all, I did my share of the work. I did a lot of work on the paper, did a lot of writing and editing. A few other people were more involved in the presentation.

The day before the group presentation, my group got together to do a run through and make sure we had everything in order. This idiot girl in the group said she had an "awesome idea". She wanted to go to Target (we were doing the presentation on Target) and buy us all red socks. Then we would present with just the red socks on...no shoes...WTF?! I literally said to her "HELL NO." I just didn't see the point. Wouldn't it make more sense for us to just wear red shirts or something. Why would anyone be looking at our feet during the presentation? And if they were, we would look like shoeless ass clowns. Other people were like, yeah, I don't know about it. I thought the matter was dropped.

The day of the presentation, the idiot girl brings a bag full of red socks and everyone laughs and starts putting them on. It's literally minutes before our presentation. I am nervous and thinking about what I am going to say. I'm not spending this precious time putting on red socks. Plus, I was wearing a skirt suit with knee high boots (the professional kind, not the come eff me kind). I wasn't going to take off the boots and then take off my socks under the boots and put different socks on. That was ridiculous. Plus, I'm sure that I was nervous about the last time I shaved. I just know me and I'm always nervous about this. I have pale white skin and dark brown hair, so even a small growth is noticeable and makes me uncomfortable.

I threw a fit. Yes, I was 20 years old and threw a fit. I refused to put the socks on, telling my group I thought it was the dumbest idea ever and I just couldn't focus on that right now. So, they all wore the socks and I didn't.

At the end of the day, 95% of the class got an A and I got a B+. When I asked the professor how I could have gotten a B+ when I got an A on all 3 tests and on the group paper and presentation, he said that I got a low evaluation score from the rest of my group. All because of a pair of effing red socks.