Sunday 5 October 2008

Fast Times at Internet High

After taking a break, as I often do, from the busy life of surfing the Internet, waiting for something more interesting to blast into my life, like a space-age Napoleon on a unicorn, I tried something a little different. I've been meaning to shop for clothes for a while now, and the fact that I ran out of clothes within two weeks of not washing them sort of shows that I'm running a bit short, and that perhaps I should take out some of the billions of dollars in equity funds (lies) and dole out some cash on something to make me look a little snazzy. However, being the interminable excuse for a man that I am, I was not alive enough, being racked with the fabled "freshers flu" at the time, and so I turned to a whole new kettle of fish. The realm of Internet Shopping. (dun dun duuuuuun, dramatic exposition)

Okay, you all saw it coming.

Well anyway, the whole experience, as horrible and frightening as it was can roughly be summed up in one not-at-all made up anagram; REAL. Really Expensive And Languid.

Okay, its a little forced, but the point I'm trying laboriously to unearth is that the system that many mainstream stores use to buy clothes and other items is fundamentally flawed, or, in more succinct terms, bollocks. I should not have to write my card number four thousand times in about four thousand different combinations that would put the maker of the enigma code to shame, although lets face it, working with the Nazis should be shame enough, and to be fair, he probably had a lot on his plate, but I digress.

Another issue is the newsletter. Unless I sign up for a bi-centennial-quarterly-week newsletter, I am denied access to the very items I have paid for. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for subtle advertising, and I sometimes even have a modest interest in a passing billboard as I streak past it in my fast car with all the female movie stars inside, but this all seems a little forward. It's kinda like when someone asks if you would like to donate to charity in the street, and you guiltily oblige, only to find that you have to sign a contract and supply three forms of I.D and a sperm sample to prove you aren't going to out-fox the dolphins.

Well, it's probably not like that, but in any case that's forking annoying.

I guess I can't really complain about the whole system though. Considering all the progress we have made in the matter of computers in the last twenty years, it's unsurprising that a shop consisting entirely of robots would have a few glitches, and of course it could just be me being a giant idiot and not knowing which number is the card number.

And all I wanted to buy was a tie, and you cant really rely on places like Topman for that, because if you re going for the whole tie and shirt look, and you're shopping in Topman for that sort of thing, the likelihood is you'll end up looking like a new-age fluorescent cockney Emo twit, at which point you'll have gone too far up your own arse to qualify for a student rail card, so I suppose the whole experience was worth it in its own special way.

Safely walk to school without a sound

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