Leave Nothing But Footprints

About 10 years ago I was in a weight loss mode. (That's dieting for you non-engineers.) Every day during lunch I would go for a brisk walk around the grounds where I worked. One day I was walking through the employee parking lot (with that morally superior attitude weight-loss moders acquire) and noticed up ahead of me a concrete drainage cut in the grass median that separated two rows of parking spaces. As I approached the cut, I thought to myself "Gee, that concrete still looks wet. But they wouldn't leave wet concrete unmarked for someone to just walk through."

So onward I walked right into the cut where the concrete was, of course, still wet.

I left three of the most beautiful footprints you ever saw.

Because the concrete was almost set, they remained. And for the last decade every time I saw that drainage cut, there were my footprints, tangible, if anonymous, evidence that I had been there. Several times I have said to people "See those prints. I made those."

Today for reasons known only to my employer, they jackhammered the concrete cut where my footprints were into rubble. Perhaps they just discovered my vandalism. But in any event, I found myself in a peevish mood all day, the symbol that I had been there now gone.
K-