Thursday, December 20, 2007

Pretty, useless

I found another thing to add to the It’s Just For Looks category.

I have a new winter coat this year. True, I bought it on sale. It was a lot on sale, but no so much on sale that I look at discovering the snaps are purely decorative in nature as a happy surprise, not after discovering that the zipper was just kind of there for looks as well. It was cheap but it was not free. I mean, at some point the coat was being sold at full price

And the zipper did work, for a while. Like in the store and the first couple of times I wore it and then one time I went to zip it up and it kind of stuck, but then it worked and then I went to zip it up later and it did the same thing and I blamed the humidity and after that it warmed up and I didn’t need a coat so I put it out of my mind.

But then it got winter again and I put the coat on and went to zip it up and it did it again and I was like Oh. It’s doing that thing again, but this time it zipped up – in appearance, it didn’t really. What it really did was unzip itself and then be a real pain to rezip and it would do this three or four times until I was making myself late for work. The coat comes with snaps, so I assumed that they functioned as snaps. I thought that was why they gave you both options. You can zip it closed or you can snap it closed and in case the zipper fails, well the snaps are there for you. I’m sure it was a selling point and I bet they charged me for those snaps. They should have mentioned that they were just for looks, like the pretend second set of pockets.

I have a really old coat, vintage even, and it has zipper issues too. But it has 50 year old zipper issues and I can understand that. 50 years old and it still has its original zipper and it will still zip if you give it a running start. It doesn’t have snaps because it doesn’t need snaps. New coat? New coat all ready needs a new zipper and I don’t want to put a replacement zipper in a new coat.

But I’m going to, I mean, it’s get a new zipper or toss the coat. I don’t want to toss the coat and I don’t want to keep wearing the old coat and the really old coat is too heavy for the average day around here. Its wool and weighs about the same as the sheep it came from. And its bright red. It’s memorable to say the least. For every-day wear, I’m not really looking to be memorable. I’m looking for a working zipper.

Attention guy who offices next to me: Stay in your damn office! Stay put! Stop getting up. You make me nervous. And stay out of my office. No, I didn’t forget to stamp that, don’t look at me like that, it’s a fax, and it comes with its own stamp, it’s pre-stamped. Go away. Every time I see you, you give work back to me, I gave it to you, it’s your work, you do it. Troll

Do you know why they invented cell phones? So that you can get up and leave and have private conversations, privately - In private where I can’t hear you. Take the phone outside and have this conversation elsewhere. In private. Away from me. All you have to say to the caller is “I can’t really talk here, let me call you back on my cell in a few and we can talk about this at length IN PRIVATE”.

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