It's You, Dahling
We had to hit the mall last weekend to refresh my wardrobe—underwear, socks, and casual pants. We separated at one point, Eileene to get some food, me to get my socks. Some guy stopped me on my way from sock shopping to the food court.
It’s hard to hear in the Garden State Mall, although the noise level doesn’t seem very high. I suspect they pump white noise through the building. In any case, I had a hard time figuring out what this stranger wanted, so I didn’t realize he was a booth vendor, and wanted to ply his schtick until after he’d already grabbed my hand and energetically buffed the nail on the middle finger of my left hand. He had been asking me for a finger to demonstrate his product, a nail-buffing sponge.
His patter—what I could hear of it—needed some work. When he chirped that I could have shiny fingernails with only a few minutes work every month, I replied that I didn’t want shiny fingernails at all, and that I didn’t want to do any work on them every month, which left him non-plussed. His choice of target needed a lot of work; I’m not the kind of guy who worries about the finer details of his appearance, nor am I the kind of guy to buy something just to get a salesman out of my hair. I like argument, and I’m good at it, and I despise the hard sell. Out of sheer cussedness, I turn on hard-sell salesmen and do my best both to make them look foolish and to make them waste as much time as possible trying to squeeze blood from a stone, instead of fleecing an easier mark. Ask the evangelists who ring my doorbell every month or two. When the nail guy insisted that shiny fingernails are impressive, and I asked point blank who I should impress, he paused and replied “nobody.” A good salesman would have had a ready answer.
But most of all, his presentation needed work. I ended up with one shiny fingernail. It did not look good. It did not match the other nine, and that kind of thing just gets up my anal-retentive nose, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. If all ten nails had been buffed, I probably wouldn’t notice or care, but if I did, they would strike my middle-American sensibilities as…how shall I put this? Not entirely masculine. Silly. Nothing wrong with shiny fingernails on a guy, just my mild knee-jerk prejudice kicking in, and frankly I’d rather not inflict my own mild knee-jerk prejudices on myself; it’s bad enough that I inflict them on others. But because he didn’t have a product to put the structural ridges back onto my nail, I’m stuck with this one until it grows for its entire length and I can clip it off, requiring maybe half a year.
One shiny fingernail, at least in my book, has negative advertising value; that is, seeing it makes me less likely to want shiny fingernails, not more. Salesmen: if you want to sell your product, present it in a way that makes your customer think it looks good, not in a way that makes them think it looks worse than its absence. Duh.
The salesman asked for my finger. That’s what I should have given him.