Consumer Digest

I hate La Senza because its lingerie is generally designed for The Girl, which as you'll recall from my last post, I am not. In the spring and summer it becomes a frightening, blinding place with neon pinks and greens, "pretty" patterns with polka dots, flowers, and swirls, and an astonishing array of products to turn female breasts (which are not, naturally, spherical) into high-sitting, nipple-free globes of gel, air, water, and padding.

The novelty wears out.

However, I needed underwear desperately, as the mice raided my own stash and no amount of laundering cleanses the memory of mouse shit. And I needed it cheaply.

Buying undergarments makes me think about sweatshops more than anything else, and that makes this process joyless. I become your nightmare customer; outside all smiley, inside brewing with rage and hurting and frustration. I don't want to live in a society that will judge me on the visibility of my nipples under a shirt, the symmetry and uniformity of the fat on my chest. I especially don't want to live in a society that underpays the women who do backbreaking work making these garments, and then overcharges me to promulgate the whole cycle.

Long story short, the person at the counter was pleasant. An environmental studies major, in fact. I wanted to ask her how she feels about working for a known sweatshop user, but thought better of it. If I see her again I'll ask. She agreed that the sports bras I was buying (no padding!) were very comfortable.

In other news, Modcloth answered my website-related email within the hour, and said they'd email again just to tell me when the issue was corrected. Hot damn.

The Source At Circuit City: 0

I find that staff in stores that specialize in electronics tend to be snobby and disdainful. They treat me like The Girl, which is a killswitch. I'm not The Girl, meaning, I don't subscribe to notions of femininity. I can pay for my own supper, think my own thoughts, and defrag my own hard drive. I don't care much for children, my choice of alcoholic beverage is a cold, imported beer, and I prioritize comfort over style - meaning you will never see me in a pair of heels, trying to run across an intersection with all the majesty of an antelope getting taken down by lion (floundering, falling, losing limbs).

So I don't appreciate being ignored in favour of guitar-playing dork dudes when I want customer service. That means you, The Source (At Circuit City). It's not like I was there to buy a pink skin for my iPod. I wanted some serious headphwnage (yes, I spelled that right) and a couple cables as well.

There's a commercial on TV for some guy deodorant which is a manifestation of this. The announcer says, "Men love technology." Then the deodorant stick suddenly shoots out several terrible animations of "technology" which are supposed to represent various attributes of the product, Swiss Army knife style. A girl, all toweled up, suddenly walks into the bathroom, sees the SuperDeororant and shrieks like The Girl.

Because she's scared of it. Because men like technology. The closest a woman would get to technology is her revolutionary new mascara. Right?

In my opinion, math fear is like technology fear: fear of the unknown. And it's hard to know math and technology if your social system repeatedly slaps your hands away and says "Don't touch, this is too hard for you, this is a guy thing, don't worry about it, you don't need to know this."

And these giant sociological gears grind round and round, and like a miniscule butterfly effect, I get bad customer service.