a cynic's guide to modern life
Commentary #6 4.18.03
Trading Trends: Leave Me in Peace!
Daily life often gives me aneurysms, but I can almost always manage to avoid the flotsam that pollutes the river that is popular culture.
But in this particular instance, it’s nearly impossible. Due to both the popularity of the show Trading Spaces and my current occupation, I’m stampeded on Saturday afternoons by an army of soccer moms whose lives are so empty and unfulfilling they have to latch onto whatever the latest fad the TV tells them is popular. This year, it seems, everybody is playing interior designer.
I have no problem with people who pursue interior design as a hobby, as long as they’re willing to commit their time and energy to it. But in true Western world fashion, both time and energy is already committed glued to the television. Whatever scraps remain is apparently devoted to annoying me. It all starts with a soccer mom with too much time, too much money and too little smarts, toting her husband who is struggling with armloads of fabric swatches and paint samples behind her, coming up to me, whether I’m serving customers, on the phone, or otherwise got my hands full and announces triumphantly: “I’ve got a vision!”
You have to imagine the vision of me shuddering, knowing that this is going to take a while and realizing before this is over I’m going to need a couple of Aspirins and a pint of whisky.
They explain what they want to do, which often leaves me baffled because despite my monstrous salary with a major home renovation chain store, I have no formal training in interior design. Hell, I’ve never even been in their house. I sell wood trim. That’s what I do. I can tell you what wood trim goes where, the pros and cons of each species of wood, which profiles match each other, but if I were trained in design, I would be working in design, not as an estimating monkey in a big box store.
But, I try to help. This is how the conversation usually goes…
“I want trim that is different from what everybody else has. Especially Sally and Bill down the road. We have to keep up with them because our lives are so empty and vacuous, we have nothing better to do.”
I glance at the husband, who might launch some kind of protest to the effect of ‘who gives two shits what Sally and Bill down the road are doing’ if he didn’t look so tired and defeated.
So, in a futile attempt to service the customer, I suggest they can do a build-up. A build-up involves laying one trim on top of another to create an entirely new profile. Build-up possibilities are practically endless, so the customer can create a profile that is unique to their home. I show them what to do, show them what profiles are available, and tell them to play around until they find something they like.
“But that’s too much work (I swear to God I hear this). Don’t you have something that’s already made?” Or, “Can you do that for us?”
Huh? You want to play interior designer, you want something that’s unique and different, but you want something that’s already done for you? Where’s the logic here?
I know the idea of actually swinging a hammer is frightening to some people, but that’s the price and the whole idea of uniqueness. You have to work at it. But since the soccer mom’s precious time is already earmarked for such worthwhile activities as swiping credit cards, yelling at incompetent clerks and trying to dress like whatever actress is the flavour of the month, who has time to actually to put the labour into design? Let’s just pretend to be a designer, get everyone else to do the actual work for us, and then we’ll brag to our friends that evening as we’re pretending to be wine and cheese connoisseurs the time and effort it took to make their home special.
So, since I won’t spend my time building profiles for them, and since we don’t sell lengths of trim that fit the exact measurements of the walls of their home (what’s the length of your walls? I don’t know, average I guess), another customer goes away unsatisfied. Oh well, another suburbanite’s dream is shattered. I try.
Copyright © 2003 Don Porter. All rights reserved.