Today was… bizarre, for lack of a better description. I woke up on the tail end of a sex dream to look at the clock and see it was 6:14. And I couldn’t go back to sleep. So I sucked it up and decided to hustle, doing a boatload of pitching and – much to my happiness – nabbing some new work. Then I heard from the publicist about my first batch of radio interviews, set for the day before my birthday. I made lunch plans with Jennifer, the other “face� of the book (as the other two women are anonymous), so we could get to know each other before we make the trip to New York together. For whatever reason it started to feel like everything inside my office was moving super fast while everything outside was at a standstill. Like I said, bizarre.
Anyway. I e-mailed and sat on the phone and finished some articles… I got so busy that I forgot to nap, and before I knew it I had to run out the door for appointments and errands. I got invited to go to the Maxim party tonight, but I realized as I laid on the couch with ice on my knee that I was incredibly tired. So I gave in to the comatose.
Which is why you get to suffer with a really old piece I wrote – I think I wrote it something like seven years ago – about being a sales girl in a lingerie store. I was about to say this was written before my life was full of excitement, but that’s not really true. There was tons of excitement - I just never wrote about it... well, until the book. You’re just going to have to wait for it to come out to get to the exciting stuff.
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Like many, I paid my dues by spending many man-hours in retail helping other people spend their money. I sold shoes, luggage, jewelry and clothes, but nothing beat working in lingerie.
It was the first retail job I had after the end of my illustrious food services career. Sick of slicing mortadella and gutting chickens for the Safeway deli, I jumped at the chance to hock frillies at Canada's answer to Victoria's Secret, La Senza. And now that I've seen Vicky's Secret, I have to say La Senza did a pretty good job at, uh, emulating their style. But I digress. Instead of dishing out potato salad I'd be finding the right size of thong. Instead of shrink wrapping blocks of cheddar I'd be tissue wrapping delicate bras. And last but certainly not least, I'd have a nice store discount to build my personal collection.
The store was a new opening. I was excited to be hired as a full timer through Christmas, and that's right when the store was opening -- December 1st. I was promised to make a shitload of money with my commission. I couldn't wait. I had never sold a thing in my life, but I was sure I could sell underwear. I mean, how hard could it be?
It wasn't hard at all. In fact, I learned a very valuable lesson my first day on the selling floor:
Men will buy anything you tell them to.
At least, that was my experience. My first day a guy walked in looking for something for his girlfriend. He seemed to be completely lost in the sea of satin and lace, so naturally I offered to help navigate him through it. He looked utterly mesmerized by everything I told him as we considered teddies and tap sets, fondled negligees and marabou. By the time I got him to the cash desk he had decided on a silk pajama set with a matching housecoat, a matching bra and panties, slippers, stockings, aromatherapy kits and a gift certificate just in case there was something he missed. He spent well over $500. I bought a CD player with the commission.
From then on, men were my target. My experience with helping women taught me that approaching them is largely unnecessary. Not that they don't need help, but face it -- ladies, when you go shopping for lingerie, do you know what style you like and what size you wear and what bras work best for you? On the whole, yes. Do men? On the whole, no. So you see where I'm going with this. Most men were cool with me teasing them and helping them out. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy leading them around the store like they were blind, coercing them into spending lots on little squares of fabric.
There was only one time that I had a violent reaction. At the front of the store was a rack full of these bodysuits that belonged in a Fredrick's of Hollywood more than a La Senza. They were netted, with a thong that went straight up the back, and had marabou trim along the breast. Essentially, it was tacky in a big way. One day this guy was nervously walking around the store, looking at things, his face tomato red. He stopped at the tacky bodysuits and fingered the material of the first one, which -- as we were trained to hang things in order -- was always a size small. So I walked up to him as he pulled it off the rack and said, "I think you'd need a bigger size. A small would cut you right in half." It was the line I always used when men played with that particular piece, and they usually laughed or pretended to try it on. Not this guy. He looked at the thing, then at me, and said in a panicked voice, "It's not for me! It's not for me!" while backing away from me. Then he dropped the garment on the floor and ran out the door. I never saw him again. But it didn't stop me from using that line.
Now, don't go thinking selling lingerie was all fun and games and teasing men and making big sales, because it wasn't. The downsides:
The Panty Table: This thing was such a huge pain in the ass. At the front and back of the store was a teardrop shaped table that held panties. The one at the front of the store was for the satin and lacey ones that matched bras, and the ones at the back were all cotton utility panties. We would have to fold one of each size in each color and style in rows on those tables every morning. And every morning the table would look beautiful, and we'd open the doors, and the first thing customers would do was come in and demolish was the panty table. So when we weren't busy helping customers, we had to fold panties. Again. And again. And again. It was so bad that I started folding my panties the same way at home. I now throw them in my drawer in a massive heap of lingerie as a form of protest to my panty slinging days.
The Stock Room: The stock room reminded me of a friend's basement. Her father kept absolutely everything -- Everything! -- and there wasn't a square foot of open space down there because of all the boxes of junk. So when they had to move, he told her she had to pack the basement. That's what the stock room was like. It wasn't as big as a basement, but it was stocked to the gills with so much stuff that it made it hard to find things, or move things around to find things. It was so bad that sometimes stafffers would go in there and never come out, swallowed up in a sea of cami sets, never to be seen again. Every once in a while my manager would get these wild ideas about reorganizing the stock room, but it never happened.
The Discount: Yeah, you'd think this would be a good thing, wouldn't you? But no way. I now own more useless lingerie than any woman on the planet. Merry widows, garters, stay ups and corsets -- I had loads of 'em, and I don't know why. But that's what the discount does to you -- it makes you believe that you need all this lingerie because it's so damn cheap. Stupid discount.
Working Boxing Day: I think this one is pretty self explanatory.
But before I knew it, my lingerie loving days were over. After the madness of Christmas yielded a pretty good windfall for me, the shopping ended. We suffered a post-Christmas drought so bad that some of the full-timers were let go, and I was one of them. And although I didn't miss the panty table or the stock room or that part-time bitch that always tried to butt in on other people's sales, I did miss the fun of asking men the origin of the nondescript animal on the jungle underwear and helping women find the bra that gave just the right oomph. To this day, over five years later, I still get a little nostalgic when I walk into a lingerie store to stock up, and wonder if I could ever go back to those days.
Then I remember the panty table and decide that writing is a lot less painful.
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