Yet another case of the insidious and growing pattern of
discrimination against males/men/guys/girly-men
– whatever they’re calling us these days, I can’t keep up: store
credit cards.
Yet another case of the insidious and growing pattern of discrimination against males/men/guys/girly-men – whatever they’re calling us these days, I can’t keep up: store credit cards. This burgeoning diabolical phenomenon has got to stop immediatimento before something truly tragic happens to what little is left of us.
Time was when there were credit cards; one, maybe two max, and you used them for everything except beer, for which you paid cash – it’s a guy thing. No matter where you were you’d whip out that old tried-and-true plastic ducat, scribble something unreadable on the receipt – maybe it was your name, maybe not if you were in a playful mood – and you were on your way. Life was good.
Ah, the things that are no more. Now every place you go, grocery store, liquor store, hardware store, boat rental, clothing store, funeral parlor, airline, the neighbor kid’s lemonade stand on the sidewalk, they all want you to get a store card. I mean, there you are, having selected your dress shirt or ball peen hammer or casket and you’re pulling out your wallet, instinctively checking to make sure you have enough cash for beer, and before you can slap that MasterVisa down on the counter the cashier says, “Want a store card? It’ll save you 10 percent right now.” And well, jeez, 10 percent off right now sounds like something you really shouldn’t pass up, so you say, “Uh, yeah, sure, I guess” and the next thing you know you’re answering “just one more question” on a form the length of the Constitution and you’ve got yourself another piece of plastic.
But see, we’re guys, and we carry wallets. We don’t (so far, please God don’t let it happen) carry purses, which are portable steamer trunks with infinite capacity, so what the hell, toss another five pounds of credit cards in there, who’ll notice? No sir, we have a very limited space in which to put the things we go out into the world with, and we keep stuffing more and more plastic into it until most guys are developing a pronounced lean when they sit down.
Eventually evolution will play its hand, and male babies will be born with a hollow in one buttock to accommodate the store card-filled wallet they’ll grow up to carry. This will have many consequences; for example, certain macho workout videos will have to change names from “Buns of Steel” to “Bun of Steel, Other Bun Shaped Like A Soapdish”, and guys will discover that if they accidentally put their wallet in the wrong back pocket, when they sit down they topple over completely.
Another inevitable result of store-card proliferation is loss of privacy, as our wallets in the wrong hands announce in a clear voice exactly where we shop; like leaving fingerprints behind at a crime scene, we will be unable to leave any store in which we have made a purchase without taking with us a colorful advertisement for where we’ve been. Who knows …?
“Vice President and Grand Poobah Dick Cheney announced today that coalition forces have finally retrieved the smoking gun that justifies the war and entitles his faithful assistant George Bush to say ‘neener neener’ to the world. In a bombed-out government building in Baghdad they have found a store credit card from Weapons of Mass Destruction R Us — cardholder: S. Hussein. Apparently after all those years of carefully covering his tracks he couldn’t resist saving 10 percent on his first purchase. The card was found in Saddam’s wallet, which measured more than 4 inches thick and also contained cards from Macy’s, Sunoco, Banana Republic, Beverages and More, Albertson’s, OSH, Jet Blue, IHOP, Nordstrom, Century Theaters, Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret, Orange County Choppers, the Sharper Image, …”
