Monday, November 24, 2008

Why she’s on the short list of people I’d give a kidney to

A recent email conversation between me and my friend Shawna:

From: amy
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 12:49 PM
To: Shawna
Subject: Had enough

Have you ever used a nasal spray? I don’t generally like squirting stuff up my nasal passages but at this point I’d just really like to breathe. Was wondering if you had any recommendations.
I’ve been trying to look online and I’m finding all this stuff about how I could possibly become addicted to them. So if you catch me selling myself on the street to score another bottle of Afrin – be prepared for an intervention.
At this point, it’s worth the risk.


From: Shawna
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 1:40 PM
To: amy
Subject: RE: Had enough

I can’t do that stuff either not sure why. I hear it works.

Don’t worry about the addict thing it runs in the family and I am an old pro with interventions. I’ll tell you what I will wait till you get addicted to crack and become your ideal size and then will kick you off the drugs. I mean there might as well be a pay out to addiction if you ask me. Then you will hate your self for being weak and becoming an addict but you will look great naked.


Now this is a gal with my best interests at heart!

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Down with DYFEA? Join the Campaign!

You’ve just reached the checkout at the store and the gal behind the conveyor belt has already mindlessly slid 10 items past the scanner and then she turns to you and says, “Did you find everything alright?”

I hate that question.

I’M AT THE CHECKOUT! Which means that if I hadn’t found what I was looking for then I would have left – without buying anything! Or if I had more than one thing to purchase then I would have already enquired about the item I couldn’t locate to some stock boy or other employee or resigned myself to the fact that they don’t carry that product.

Maybe if they asked BEFORE they started ringing me up, then I’d believe it was more of a genuine question/concern. What are they going to do if I say; “No, I couldn’t find the right brand of heavy flow tampons.” Are they going to stop ringing me up and guide me back to the aisle and help me search, despite the lineup of 8 customers behind me? Are they going to send out a stock boy to find them? Do they write it down and have a meeting after closing to discuss how they can better organize the tampon section?

I don’t think so!

Now I realize that it’s one of those questions that’s not really a question. It’s really just a social nicety – a greeting – like when someone at the office says, “Hi. How are you?” They don’t really care. They don’t want you to launch into an itemized listing of what’s going wrong or right in your life. They just want you to say “good” so they can move along and get their coffee. I get that. But it still irritates me to no end. And I’m writing about it in the hopes that the shoddy logic of it will irritate you as well and perhaps together, we can bring about some change in this world and make that idiotic phrase obsolete in the retail environment.

Who’s with me??

I’m thinking of having some buttons made up.