# 71 MORE ON CLIMATE CONTROL

I’ve just finished a 5-Post Mini Series on Romance that I am so anxious to publish, but in the meantime I can’t just leave off this discussion of Climate Control without one more observation, trivial though it may seem.

Now, you know I hate the dreaded trip to town, but far worse than that is the dreaded trip to the city. I go infrequently, once or twice a year, but when I do go, I usually have a list of several purchases including clothes. And that’s where my beef really comes into play.

It happens every year. Around Christmas I decide it would be a good idea to get a new pair of dress slacks and a couple of tops. It’s winter so I dress with a snuggly knit top under my jacket. One never knows if the car might break down or I might be forced to walk a mile or two. And when I get to the city and get in them malls, God help me. I shed my coat, throw it in my push cart or lug it around over one arm but still I swelter from the heat. I can’t even breathe.

And I get in a dressing room and I feel like I am locked in a fiery furnace room. I look around me at the clerks. They are all dressed in sleeveless, neckless, silk hanky tops and skirts that cover no more of their bare legs than a bikini bottom. They are doing fine. Seem comfy.

It shouldn’t be allowed. It shouldn’t be. When it is winter, and customers with common sense, dress for winter, shopping malls and dress shops should have to take that into account for customer comfort rather than jacking up the heat to suit a bunch of half-naked clerks. It’s pretty disgusting to think that all those high-priced clothes are being tried on daily, hourly, by bodies wet with sweat.

And why shouldn’t I be annoyed? This discomfort on top of the annoyance of a clerk who selected a top for me and told me I look positively stunning in orange (when even Hub tells me with wise discretion that I don’t have to wear orange if I don’t want to). Orange is a color that makes me look sicker than sick.

And then while my transactions are being completed there is my designated clerk conversing with another clerk about her new boyfriend rather than acknowledging my presence in any way, shape, or form. Or the clerk in the fabric shop yesterday, that informed me cotton is cotton, and there is no light or heavy weight cotton in this shop. Interpretation - I don’t feel like helping you look and it’s okay with me if you shop somewhere else. And then, when one is in a terrible hurry, not for another appointment, but just to escape the heat, there is that other problem that Middle Daughter pointed out to me that is definitely true.

Watch the clerks in fast food joints or in any retail business and you will notice something happening that is already well out of control. The new generation is in the midst of a biological evolution. We have a society that is rapidly morphing to the use of only one hand.

So get out there, if you can stand the heat. Be on the lookout and you will find this is very true. Maybe if and when I start to morph I can use that other hand, that has no other function, to fan my body.