The Pocket Versus the Purse

This afternoon, the missus and I endured an usually long line at the coffee shop.

Our cashier, a fresh young man with crisp tattoos and silver piercings, pecked warily at the register. He seemed skittish with the customers too, as if our sole purpose for being was to annoy him with unreasonable demands.

Clearly the kid was having a hard time and most of us were empathetic to the awkwardness of being an inexperienced clerk under the merciless scrutiny of experienced customers.

Less forgivable was the inability by some people to master the simple art of being a customer.

I am speaking specifically of the woman ahead of me in line, the one who ordered a plain bagel and large house coffee.

They say females can multi-process. Not this one.

She waited for the clerk to struggle through the entirety of her two item order before hefting a purse the size of a body bag onto the counter.

She slowly unzipped the zipper and peered tentatively almost secretively through the narrowest of possible openings, causing some speculation the purse might be stolen, for she certainly seemed unfamiliar with its contents.

Or perhaps there was a bomb in there, an explanation for why she probed so carefully from one side to the other.  Or maybe it WAS a body bag. Lord knows.

An eternity past while she dug through her purse. But finally, she found what she was looking for and pulled out - another purse. A coin purse.

This she cautiously unzipped and slowly dug out three quarters which she ritualistically lined up on the counter.

Then she spelunked back into the cavern of her bag for a wallet... which of course had to be painstakingly unzipped and unfolded before yielding two one-dollar bills.

Once the clerk managed to make change, the entire process repeated itself in reverse. She placed the change into the coin purse which she carefully closed, zipped and placed .... Oh for heaven sakes you know what I'm talking about.

What I want to know is why?

This got me thinking about pockets and purses.

Take my word for it, after more than half a century of being a son, brother, husband and father to females, I appreciate the mysteries of womanhood. I get it. I understand why women hesitate to venture into a hostile world with less than full kit.

What I cannot fathom is why women refuse to use POCKETS!!!

Pockets are simple, practical and have a natural limit on how much you can stuff into them.

Yet women refuse to use them, even when they wear jeans.

Why?

When was the last time you saw a man turn down repayment of a fifty cent debt because it might create an unsightly bulge in his skin-tight dockers?  And yes, I know someone who did.  She knows who I am talking about.

Okay, we've established women rely on purses while guys depend on pockets.

Wrong.

Say you're about to walk into a mall with the missus. What does she do? She pops the trunk to stash her purse safely away, but not before she stuffs her keys, wallet, unmentionables along with a massive wad of Kleenex into her guy's pockets.

Why? Because she doesn't want to lug a purse.

Guys, let me clue you in on something, it was not a male who invented cargo pants.

Yet there is an upside to being the pack animal straining under the burden of Kleenex, shopping bags and loose change. When you stop at a coffee shop, and the fresh young man with the crisp tattoos and shiny silver piercings holds up a long line of impatient experienced customers by fumbling through your order ....you can whip the change out of your pocket faster than a gunslinger, pay and hustle out the door.

© Greg Schiller, 2008