Dress-shirt buttons have a special quality: About the only time they ever cross your mind is when they’re not around. Unfortunately, the discovery that a dress-shirt button is no longer attached in its expected place tends to happen at quite inopportune times. In the civilian world, it might be just as you’re stepping out for a special occasion; in the military, it typically occurs when you’ll be seeing someone who has not only been trained to notice missing shirt buttons, but who is also rather unforgiving when encountering them.
In the latter case, you might try pleading that you suffer from koumpounophobia, an irrational fear of buttons—provided you want to make a bad situation even more uncomfortable. Instead, you should opt for the simple and inexpensive solution: always keep a set or two of dress-shirt buttons on hand, along with the appropriate tools (needle and white thread). Don’t know how to sew on a button? A YouTube search for “How to sew a button on a shirt” yields “About 4,690,000 results,” so you should be able to find a quick and easy tutorial in no time.