Its Not You It's The Scanner

I took Wednesday off to embark on my first official Blogging adventure. I intended to take part in the phenomenon known as Me-Ality – a body scanner which figures your size in relation to retail stores/brand sizing.

Why, you might ask, would a rational woman, years beyond caring what size she wears, subject herself to this?

First of all – LOL! Who are we kidding. I don't care how much MORE magazine touts the wonder that is the middle age woman. I will always, in a tiny part of my brain, cringe if the jeans I try on are above a certain number and I will ALWAYS do a happy dance when that number falls below the number I am at right now.

And second of all – there is no second. I have a history of stuffing myself into vertical booths. (This would be the Spray Tan Incident. Or, as my daughter likes to call it – The Day Mom Stuck Me in a Gas Chamber.)

Today was about sharing a potentially humiliating experience with my BFF. We steeled ourselves with a promise of pumpkin spice latte and walked determinedly towards the poor young woman holding a clipboard next to the space station scanner tube. I could almost hear her thoughts: please don't let them stop here. There is not enough vodka tonic at Fridays to get their pitiful pleas of past shopping trips to 5-7-9 out of my head."

Did I mention that the scanner sits IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MALL?

Before we could even say "Hello, we would like to be publicly humiliated" the poor clerk holds her clipboard up like a shield and says, "I'm sorry. The scanner is down for the day. The entire day."

Thus avoiding the following conversation:

Me: "I am sure the machine has to be wrong. Please put Forever 21 into your search engine again."

Clerk: "Ma'am, it clearly says your best bet for skinny jeans is Bob's Big Girls or perhaps you would like to explore MiddleAgeMommas. Either way, the machine has spoken. The Machine Has Spoken. It has."

Frankly, I think we were all a little relieved.

(I fully intend to try the scanner as the company actually emails you the results and your size equivalent to a huge number of stores which would save me a huge amount of time NOT trying on clothes and thus needing to return them. For anyone interested the company info follows:

http://www.me-ality.com/about

PS-The Spray Tan Incident is another story. Which I will post one day when I am sure the Spray Tan People won't come after me.