On being a girl at the hardware store

[go_team]

So my parents visited this week, from late Saturday night until about an hour ago, and that meant doing lots of projects around the house which in turn meant many trips to the hardware store. At one of these, I had a hilarious experience which I feel I must relate to you, my LiveJournal readers.

As you probably know, I'm not much of a girly girl, but I'm also not butch enough to really know my way around the hardware store¹, and I will probably never be able to make myself at home there like my dad does without even thinking about it. But the girliest I've felt in a long time was when my dad turned to a guy in the screws and bolts aisle and asked "Do you work here?" and my first thought on looking at the guy was "Not in those shoes, he doesn't."

I mean, really. Flip-flops?

It was all I could do to avoid thinking my ridiculously girly thought out loud, and I think they might have thrown me out of the store at that point to keep me from being a bad influence on the three-year-old further down the aisle, whose dad was doing a great job of introducing him to the important male bonding experience of the difference between stainless and brass nuts and bolts. What does it say about me that I thought they were really cute, but in an embarrased yet envious kind of way?

---

1. Just to defend my machismo a bit, I'd like to point out that we're talking a hometown True Value here, not one of those well-labeled Home Depot or big-box hardware stores, oh no.

Comments

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

Heh. We went to the hardware store today. Sarah bought wood; I bought housecleaning supplies.

[alpinebutterfly.livejournal.com]

I've gotta say that I don't think the "shoes thought" makes you girly at all. I mean, my stereotypes of girly-girls are that *they* would be the ones to walk into the machine shop, sparks and hot metal flying everywhere, wearing hot pink daisy-decorated flip flops while all the manly men working the machines freak out because she's wearing open-toed shoes. Nope, I've got to conclude it's a stereotypically manly thought to have about the type of safety footwear appropriate to a dangerous, tool-laden environment like a hardware store, especially for an employee. In fact, that's a very nice bit of detective work you did there ... worthy of a Sherlock Holmes or one of those hard-boiled film noir detectives ... all men, by the way.

I've worked in several machine shops and visit engineering specialty stores more often than general hardware stores - I wonder if that gives me a skewed perspective? On the other hand, I'm a girl, and a clothes-obsessed one at that, so I'm not sure my instinctual reaction to the situation is on par with cultural norms for hardware store and manly man-related stereotypes. Hmmmm ... anyway, mostly the point of this comment was to tell you I thought your story was pretty amusing. I just wanted to tease you about it.

:)

-A

[goteam.livejournal.com]

I am so looking forward to seeing you this weekend. My latest brilliant scheme involves a girly trip to the spa while the boys go shopping for Utilikilts. Think it'll work?