Ick, cat barf. I’ve stepped in that a few times. Usually it’s early in the morning on my while I’m making my way to the kitchen for some breakfast. It’s nice and dark, and I’m thinking “I really hope the cat didn’t…” squish
Nah, slugs don’t bother me (I garden barefoot in the Pacific Northwest) and I’d rather step on one than a nail or glass. I agree that stepping on, or in, a putrefying sheep, or human feces, would put me off my feed.
I once stepped on a red hot charcoal briquette on my parents’ back patio. I crushed the thing so the pieces stuck to the bottom of my foot. That was breathtaking.
A dead porcupine. Disgusting and painful.
I didn’t exactly step on it, but a vial of prank skunk-smell liquid hit my shoes during a chaotic freshman retreat out of an innagural high school assembly. This incident is particularly noteworthy due to the coarse smell of the fluid, the unsolved nature of the crime, and the memories of the building dread as I slowly realized the awful permanancy of my predicament over a full school day. The day could play out like a movie…
Hmmm, maybe I should go write it as a short story…
I liked those shoes, too, dammit.
A screwdriver. It went through my foot.
I still have the scar! It’s pretty neat. At the time, of course, it was horrifying because I was about ten or eleven years old, but luckily my dad had just gotten out of the Army and still had his emergency surgery kit - I didn’t even have to go to the hospital! (thank God, too, cuz we didn’t have the money for it)
~Tasha
The still-fuzzy tail of squashed roadkill near the sidewalk. Good times.
In the vein of things that, rather than being gross or dangerous, are painfully annoying to step on, I’ll suggest d4s (tetrahedral dice) from D&D. Damn things are like caltrops.
Oh, wait. Worst thing I ever stepped on was some ice in a parking lot on Île des Soeurs. Broken ankle in the last week of a political campaign = highly overrated.
Not very nice to be rolled onto in the heat of passion, either (don’t ask; we were geeks in love).
Hello, fellow geek traveller, I came into this thread to mention the exact. same. thing. Particularly as I did it this weekend, not once, not twice, but three times. My husband spilled his dice bag on the carpet, and some of his dice are about that color, so…
That, and the spine/thorn thing I stepped on when I was a kid, mostly cause it was still attached to the spiny/thorny branch it was on and I couldn’t walk home. A nice older man stopped and started talking to me, and yanked the thing out when I wasn’t looking at it. Which was his good deed for the day! (The spine/thorn thing was a good two inches long.) :eek:
Cheers,
Mel
Walking in the Lake District, a beautiful day, wall to wall sunshine.
We take a stroll across a field intending to visit the church at St. Johns in the Vale and at the far end of the field is a stream.
It’s a shallow stream so we take off our shoes and start to cross, yours truly finds the only submerged pothole in the stream and goes up to his knees in a dead lamb.
That lamb was well rotten 
. Both my legs are covered in a glutinous mass of yellow/green/brown all sorts of manky colours and boy did it smell.
My pals thought it was hilarious, well they would.
From the husband (my favorite oblivious kid story):
As a wee lad, he and his mom were traipsing along, when suddenly he feels a sharp pain in the sole of his foot. The shoe (a flipflop) is removed and mom dutifully inspects the foot. It appears undamaged. Meanwhile, Future Husband is holding the flipflop, idly twirling the stick that is protruding at a right angle from the bottom. Mom give the foot a clean bill of health, the shoe is replaced, FH starts to trot off and, goddamn but that sharp pain comes back again! WTF?!? 
Before reading this thread, I didn’t realize so many people stepped on dead animals. My own experience was a disembowelled opposom on the side of the road, which made me puke up my breakfast, which landed all over the possom and my bloody, gut covered shoe.
Bear scat.
Hot bear scat.
This one is TMI
I suddenly without warning passed a bunch of huge uterine blood clots and stepped on one as I was running to the bathroom.
Mine are fairly tame compared with previous posts… for which I’m exceedingly grateful!!!
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Nail sticking out of a board, went right through my sneaker sole and into the foot. While hopping around looking for a place to sit and assess the damage, managed to step on the same nail again - with the same foot (to this day I don’t know how I managed that, you’d think I’d have hit it with the otherfoot). Never did tell my parents about that one, but fortunately I was due for a tetanus shot in a few days anyway.
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A large sewing needle that I’d dropped on the carpet earlier. It went into the foot at an angle… and as far as I could tell, the point got stuck in the bone, given how hard it was to extract.
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Animal excreta. No actual dead animals, thank Og!
A broken plastic figurine that had fallen off a shelf due to some construction in the next room. That one led to 4 stitches.
I haven’t seen anyone mention snails yet. In the spring here they’re everywhere, scattered about the sidewalks. I haven’t stepped on one barefoot, but I hate the crunching sound they make when I go walking. Sometimes they’re so thick you hardly take a step without hitting one. Ugh.
Ohhh, baby, nothing like hot bear scat!
I haven’t stepped in any, nor am I in Grizzly country like you, but it’s quite a feeling rounding a bend on a trail and seeing a still-steaming pile of bear poop. You freeze, and think: that…bear…is…here…somewhere… Still, it’s not quite as scary as coming upon a bear cub suddenly, knowing you may very well be between it and it’s mama. I did that once…luckily, I spotted mama in the brush up the hill to my left and IMMEDIATELY AND CAREFULLY backtracked and waited a good long while before continuing on.
Harborwolf once stepped on a plastic Maggie Simpson doll. Right on her little, hard plastic, spikey head. He yelped in pain, and I doubled over with laughter.
I bet it was a present from the kittie cat.
I’m also sure it didn’t have to go very far to a proper burial.
(Flush!) :eek: