On the way back from lunch today, my co-worker that I went to lunch with dragged me into a shoe store. Seems he broke the laces in one of his shoes and had been all over creation looking for replacements but couldn't find them in the usual places -- Target, Rite-Aid, he even looked in the supermarket -- so he decided to look in the obvious place: a shoe store. They actually had shoelaces, which was mildly surprising because it was an upscale shoe store. Man, did they have laces. They had them in these nice little wooden drawers with "LACES" carved into the front of the drawer so that it completely matched with the upscale décor of the entire store. We dove into the laces selection -- which was divided out by size, color and consistency -- to pick him out some. He didn't want the waxed kind, which most of the ones the store had were, but we managed to find a package that had black and unwaxed. Then I raised the dumbass question that I can never remember the answer to when I'm buying laces: Are there one or two laces in the package? I can't tell from looking at them because they tuck the ends inside the rolled-up part so I can't count how many ends there are. And the fact that there's anywhere between 30 and 54 inches of laces (depending on what I'm buying laces for) means that the amount of laces in the package could conceivably be all for one lace. So I asked the dumbass question, expecting my co-worker to give me THAT LOOK, but instead his face went blank and he said, "Damned if I know. I can never remember that either, so sometimes I end up buying two packages because I think I need both of them to match them up." At least I'm not the only one. This time around, we asked the store clerk. And I better remember that, since I don't want to have to track down some clerk in Target the next time I'm looking for shoelaces to ask the dumbass question.