Click Your Heels

I've always liked the spare, lean look a pair of Teva sandals flaunt, the freedom to wiggle they give your toes. So when I got to Sunnyvale, California, that very heart of the dotcom valley, and I found that much of the valley floats around in the thing—and as you will see, "float" is the operative word here—I decided I wasn't leaving without a pair.

Naturally, given where I was, my search began the dotcom way: I typed teva.com into the nearest browser. Bingo! Tevas by the dozen and by all kinds of exotically unpronounceable names drifted onto my screen. Most were astonishingly ugly. One, meant for runners, looked like Reeboks worked over with a Swiss army knife. Awful. Worse, they sported all kinds of exotically outrageous prices. Eighty bucks and up for a pair of ugly sandals! (No, not Indian bucks).

What to do? Forty dollars and not a paisa more, I told myself, which itself seemed too much. Many frantic clicks later, I knew the truth: nothing on teva.com came for a sum that modest. I resigned myself to a Teva-less existence.