The joy of socks


Today I bought a pair of socks on Groupon, for forty dollars. Yeah, I love the bargains, that’s right.

It isn’t quite as profligate as it sounds. These aren’t just socks, they’re compression socks, designed to aid recovery and performance. They retail for eighty dollars normally, which is an insane amount of money to spend on socks; forty still isn’t cheap, but it’s a slightly more cost effective way to experiment with them. But still, forty dollar socks.

Actually, they’re not really socks. They don’t cover your feet, starting only at the ankle and then going up to just below the knee. This may make them easier to put on (remains to be seen) and may mean they’re more comfortable in the heat of Singapore than proper, sock-shaped socks.

I had to measure the girth of my calves to ensure I got the right fit. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to measure the girth of any part of my body before (horrific porn-spam emails don’t count) and the only things I had available to measure with was a USB cable, a sheet of A4 paper, and some trigonometry. I hope this means I get the right sized socks.

The right-sized, bright red semi-socks. I had two choices of colours, either red, or shocking pink. I’m wondering if perhaps I should have chosen the pink ones because red ones are going to clash with all my (predominately blue) running clothes anyway, so I might as well go the whole hog and look really horrible. Break out the lime vest and the silver shorts, and watch people’s eyes melt as I approach.

Of course, if you’re the kind of person who wears compression socks in public, it’s hard to imagine you have any concern for what people think you look like.

So that’s the socks. Buying them on Groupon wasn’t an unalloyed delight, even after I’d reconciled myself to wearing bright red knee-high socks with enormous logos on them. Groupon’s check out page is only one page, but oddly arranged: you have to input the street number into a different field, after the street name, as nobody on any other site I’ve ever used does it. If you don’t fill everything in, it won’t tell you this until you hit submit, and then the message telling you that you haven’t filled something in correctly doesn’t vanish after you have filled it in correctly, leaving you baffled about whether you can hit submit a second time or not, or even if you have, and Groupon are merrily double-charging your card.

Finally, when you do make your purchase, Groupon first send you a voucher as confirmation, which left me confused. Did I need to take the voucher and use it somewhere else? At a shop? Online? I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, but I was flummoxed by this until 20 minutes later a confirmation email arrived to tell me my socks were being shipped. It turns out the internet hasn’t quite been finished yet, after all.

My new socks may take a week to arrive. When they do, I’ll report back on what they’ve done for me. If everyone is lucky/unlucky, there will even be pictures.


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