COLUMN: Men, women and bargain shopping
I work a shift at my place of employment mostly with women, and I live in a house where there are mostly women.
I am also not a man’s man and am fairly in touch with my feminine side. I don’t often pull out my hip waders and clean my gun so I can climb into my 4-wheel drive extended cab with the 3000-volt spotlights on the roll-bar and drive up into the hills to fetch me some vittles to eat.
I also don’t know Karl Malone’s 3-point average, what all the hand signals made by every referee in every major sporting event mean or whether the World Cup is hockey, golf or hibachi surfing.
But if there is one thing I could do for the males of this earth, one gift I could give each and every one of them, the one thing that assures me of my manhood every day, would be to strike from all script and utterance from this globe the words “ON SALE.”
The sheer volume of noise on this earth would decrease 10-fold if women could never say, “it was on sale,” “but I got it on sale” or “did you get the one on sale?”
The concept of something being on sale is so very foreign to most men that you’d be better off trying to explain menstrual cramping or what a hot flash feels like than trying to justify an extra 15 minutes at a Females-R-Us department store for a sale.
A man also can’t get why a woman would spend $6.58 of his hard-earned money on something that doesn’t look edible, have real entertainment value (sports, cars or guns) or fit into some sort of tool category. He really doesn’t care if it was 98 percent off. And never try to tackle the concept of a rebate with a man.
When my wife and I go to the grocery store and spend a month’s wages on freezer meat, maxi pads and the all-important hair conditioner with wheat germ oil, papaya and camel-hair extracts, my wife is always quick to remind me of the $1.47 we saved on the eight-speed hair dryer with detachable crimper and body massager. This, of course, always makes me feel so much better.
But to take the cake, I was standing one day in a store with my wife and two little girls when my 4-year-old daughter grabbed some hair clips and turned to my wife saying, “Mom, I like these, are they on sale?”
At that moment I felt all of the flesh melt off my body and the devil actually reach in and take my eternal soul.
So, the next time your sweetheart utters the words, “it was on sale,” simply smile, nod and go back to the game on the television, because life is too short, and sooner or later, that ice-fishing rod with the built-in sonar will go on sale, and you will have your revenge.
Bryce Casselman’s column runs every two weeks in the Encore section. E-mail him with comments at yanobi@hotmail.com