I have very special bespoke boots. I care a lot about them - and for them too - because not only have I waited a long time to receive them and they help me walk, they’re also very expensive and they were offered to me free of charge by the public healthcare system of the country I currently live in. Meaning the taxpayers of this country offered me the best fitting shoes I’ve ever owned since I dropped a few shoe sizes 8 years ago. So I feel very grateful.

In fact, they’re the first delivery of a lifetime prescription for orthopedic footwear I was granted. Yes, you read that right: I needn’t buy winter footwear ever again! When this pair is worn out, all I have to do is call the public hospital, and hey presto, 3 weeks later, a replacement pair will show up on my doorstep. So I’m even more grateful.

Those are 3,000€ boots and I don’t want to abuse the system, so I take very good care of them so they last as long as possible. But as good as they are, they featured really annoying pull tabs at the back, like most boots:

The problem was, my pants would catch on them each time I’d get up from a seated position, and I’d have to bend down and pull my pant legs over the tabs each and every time.

I don’t need the tabs to put my boots on, so I figured I’d remove them. But I wasn’t about to take initiatives because I have never worked leather or stitched anything (well) and I did’t want to ruin my precious boots.

So I brought them to my usual cobbler yesterday. He’s done splendid leather work for me before, so I trust him. When I entered his shop, some older dude was there. After inquiring, I learned that he was his father - also a cobbler - and his son was on vacation.

Fine… I showed him my boots, pointed to the tabs, and asked him “Could you cut these off…” but before I could add “…as cleanly as you can, and ONLY if there’s no risk of unraveling the stitch!”, he grabbed a pair of scissors without saying anything, went snip-snip, then looked at me like I was a moron who couldn’t work scissors and said “Like this?”

I was horrified! He did a completely sloppy job and didn’t seem to care at all that those aren’t ordinary boots from some discount store. I looked at what he’d done for several seconds, then eventually asked him:

“Like… really? Just like that?”
“Sure” he said. “Is it so hard?”

I wanted to tell him I wanted a cleaner job than that, that this was really crummy and, well, quite frankly, disrespectful. But I figured if he treated my boots like shit to begin with, he wasn’t likely to do a better job if I asked him to explicitly.

So I just asked him if the stitch was in any danger of unraveling with what he’d done. “Naah…” he replied dismissively, like if it was obvious.

The father is a crummier cobbler than the son I guess. What a disappointment 🙁

Today a grabbed a pair of x-acto knives, mounted fresh blades on them, then carefully cut off the bits of leather the cobbler had left poking out with his half-assed scissor cuts, as straight and as evenly close to the stitch lines as I could.

I got lucky at one spot because the scissor cut almost made it all the way down to the stitch. But not quite, and luckily I had just enough material left to achieve a straight cut all the way across.

Then I chamfered the corners of the cuts, slathered some brown shoe polish a few times to darken the cross-section, and voila: the cuts look clean enough that you’d almost never know pulls tabs were there originally!