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Waiting for Change

Blog: Pasty Muncher
Posted by: Kim Mutton Wednesday 4th August 2010, 5:26pm
Last edited 04/08/2010 5:26pm by Kim Mutton

The hours men spend waiting outside women's changing rooms.

This isn’t going to be one of those general rants about women and shopping, about how you have to traipse behind them, shop after shop, only to return, inevitably, to the first shop and the first pair of shoes. This is much more specific — it’s about changing rooms and the time lost in them. My heart sinks the second I realise that the first item she has picked up isn’t going back on the rails any time soon. Any hope of this being a swift visit is lost when a second item enters the equation, meaning endless changes between the two. A third item follows, then a fourth, by which point she has ceased to ask my opinion, the “maximum 3 items” sign may as well be written in Swahili, and my afternoon is ruined.

I know what’s in a men’s changing room — a mirror, a coat hook and, if you’re lucky, a stool for a little sit-down. Given the time my wife spends trying on clothes, hers must contain a fleet of stylists, on hand to give 20-minute tutorials on, maybe, how to buckle a belt.

Meanwhile, I stand outside with the other hapless menfolk, sweating in overheated shops, like sherpas, weighed down by their shopping, trying not to look uncomfortable while forced to linger in the M&S women's underwear and lingerie section (why must it always be next to the changing rooms?).

I recently clocked up 34 minutes outside a changing room — 34 minutes spent assessing five items that had an approximate value of 1/2,000 of the flat we recently purchased which we spent a grand total of 20 minutes viewing. If the amount of time spent surveying the flat had been proportionate to the time spent trying on new dresses and clothes, we would have moved in with the vendors for a cosy month before making an offer. “But you don’t have to wait there,” she cries. “Stand outside, get some air.” But I do have to wait there. At any time I may get called upon in that shouted whisper when she pokes her head around the curtain, underwear clad from the waist up or down, waving some garment at me: “Pasty, Pasty, see if they have this in a 12. It’s the last one I’m trying on, then we’ll get lunch, I promise.” Which is a whole other minefield of indecision.

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