Luddette was walking in Best Buy the other day looking for pens. The large preoccupied boy in a blue shirt at the front door said they didn't sell pens, but I wanted to prove him wrong. I have this thing about beating sales clerks at their own jobs, showing them up to myself. It's petty, but satisfyingly petty, since I often win this one-sided game. In this case, the boy was right, so I chalked up the tour of the store to experience. My experience was that there are too many phone covers available, and all of them look silly.
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| Self-expression or too ridiculous for words? |
I will support any American's right to get rich in the free market and die of complications due to obesity, but that short wall of phone covers just bugged me in its excessive novelty. I may have the term "phone covers" wrong--I sort of perversely
hope I do--but what I mean are those rubber or plastic things
that snap onto the very big phones all the people are gazing into like
mirror-mirror these days.
Why do we need all that variety of nonsense? It just represented, in one poorly designed display, all the specially-colored crackerjack that we dangle to define ourselves--protracted childhoods and childhood junk. Of course, if I like something cute and nonsensical, it just expresses a lighthearted side of my well-balanced adult personality. Needless to say.
I eventually found pens at Fry's, and they were really cute little ones, which perfectly match the cute little notebooks I got for the Mister. I thought they'd be cute for him to carry around in his chest pocket. Their being cute and little are inherently necessary qualities of the items, geared for a purpose, and not marketing choices calculated to excite my childish desire for novelty.
