8.06.2009

Don't need no credit card to ride this train


So as not to spoil the surprise for Courtney, I won't post pictures of my hair until after I see her tonight.

I do intend to dye it light brown still (with perhaps a touch of turquoise — what?), but as long as I fried the heck out of it, I figured I might as well enjoy being a frizzy blonde for a little while. My dark roots are starting to grow in, and they're so short still that it looks like nothing so much as fungus, like I left my scalp a little too wet for too long.

Yummy.

But I will continue the hair saga with the tale of my recent purchase at Sally's Beauty Supply, and you'll see why I chose that blog post title. Though it's actually not that apropos, so really I chose it just to get that song stuck in your head.

I was flustered from the very beginning of my visit, because I had bought three things the time before that I needed to return. One was just a simple case of Oops-I-bought-the-wrong-thing, but two were failures in design and had broken on me when I tried to use them. I always feel a little sheepish returning something used and damaged, even if I'm sure the damage is not my fault.

Immediately the cashier, a big, burly dude (what you think of when you think of Sally's), followed me into the aisle and asked to have my bag up at the register, I guess so I couldn't shoplift. "Not that I think you're going to shoplift or anything," he said, confirming my suspicions that he did indeed suspect me. I started giving him the bag, hesitated, started pulling out my returns one at a time and explaining them, and then finished with, "But I need the bag. It's kind of my purse."

Yes, my old Sally's plastic bag had $80 in cash (Craigslist earnings) plus an endorsed check that were on their way to the bank, as well as my lipgloss and wallet and other assorted sundries. For I was wearing a skirt. And skirts are annoying in that they are, by and large, pocketless. And I couldn't find a purse. I'm girly enough to wear skirts but not girly enough to remember where my stash of handbags went to.

He accepted my demurring and my excuse for the mangled returns and turned to take them up to the register, then stoppd and asked me something. He was a mumbler. I'm never sure what to do with mumblers. I tend to try to guess what they're saying, which gets me in trouble. "I'm still looking," I guessed was an appropriate answer. He repeated his inquiry. "Do you want a coupon book?" Oh. All right, I suppose.

He nodded and turned out of the aisle, calling after me over his shoulder, "Do you have a license?"

I followed him toward the register. "Yes," I said, thinking my driver's license must be required to validate the returns. Then it clicked. A license to practice cosmetology. "Oh, no," I said.

He stopped and looked at me. What kind of fool doesn't know whether she's licensed or not?

He did an about face and handed me one of the plebeian coupon books from the rack near the door. "Here."

I took it and meekly resumed my shopping, thoroughly out of sorts by now. It didn't then help that every two and a half minutes for the rest of my ten minute sojourn in the store, one of the cashiers came by to ask if I needed help. I figured that was code for "What are you stuffing into that Sally's bag, you thief?"

And did I mention I had yellow hair through all this? That's enough to make any girl uneasy, but particularly in a beauty-supply store. I was advertising that I had no right to be buying beauty supplies, since I was clearly not making good use of them.

Finally, I selected my purchases, the ones that would hopefully turn my locks less goldi, and went up to the counter. Someone fell in line behind me immediately, so now I felt pressure to move through quickly.

The big, burly cashier began ringing up my new purchases with no sign of dealing with the exchanges. But whatever, I figured, I'd deal with it later. I offered my old bag for the new purchases, and his look showed he thought this was weird, but maybe it was just because I'd been using it as my purse. In an unasked-for attempt to prove my innocence, I was trying to open my bag enough to demonstrate that I had not shoplifted anything. I even rifled through it to make everything have its turn being displayed and ended up clunking my sunglasses case hard on the counter. Oh, shoot, that didn't sound like I didn't have anything substantial in here.

But now the cashier was distracting me by asking me about a Sally's discount card, because apparently the last cashier had given me the discount even though I hadn't paid to enter the club. The idea of the discount card intrigued me, so I tried to get information about it from him, but I guess he figured his duty was over in asking me about it. He seemed incommunicative and unwilling to have me fill out an application.

I was musing on this and the possible discount I was losing when he announced my total. I already had my credit card out and at the ready, the better not to hold up the person behind me, so I handed it off. Something was niggling in my brain, though.

"You have ID?" he said.

I nodded and knew that this time he meant my driver's license for real, so I started digging it out.

"I know it's only 50 cents," he continued, with a half-laugh, "but it's store policy."

Uh. Click, click. My mind interpreted his previous mumbles too late to do me any good. Forty-nine cents, he had said. My total, with the exchanges already factored in, was 49 cents.

And I had just paid with a credit card.

I must have seemed like a hardcore credit fan, or like I was so cash-poor that I didn't have even a couple quarters, never mind that I had $80 in twenties sitting in my bag, which I had on display on the counter.

That's the power of love, my friends. (See, I told you it wasn't apropos. But I do hope you'll be singing that all day.)


Photo copyright Lotus Head via sxc.hu

1 comments:

Courtney said... Best Blogger Tips

Funniest story ever. Personally, I wonder if the big burly man actually tells his friends and relatives that he works at Sally's. Or has he just beaten up everyone who made fun of him and now they don't even dare? Too funny.

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