I hate online shopping. I don’t understand how people do it. The clothes never look as good as they did online, or they don’t fit, or they arrive two weeks later than they were supposed to, or all of the above. I avoid online shopping at all costs, and would much prefer to waste hours at the mall in order to find several items that I am 100% sure about buying, than to spend 20 minutes accidentally spending crazy amounts of money on 4 pairs of shoes that I most likely won’t be able to squeeze my feet into and will consequently have to return. Also! I hate returning things. Why has no one invented a high-tech solution where you can just snap your fingers and get your money back and be freed from the object you don’t want taking up space in your room. Like are you seriously telling me I actually need to repackage and re-mail this thing I don’t even want all by myself, in order to get my own money back??! The inhumanity.
Well, recently I discovered there is something even worse than online shopping, and that would be online bikini shopping. Last month, with spring break around the corner, I joined many college girls across the country in making the horrifying realization that I have absolutely zero bikinis. (Yeah, yeah you USC/Tulane people don’t have these problems and the rest of us losers in the arctic tundra are not at all jealous of you). With barely a week until break, I was up to my neck in midterms and knew that I wouldn’t have time to make the dreaded trip to the mall. So, I began the endeavor of scouring the world wide web for 2 pieces of polyester that would rack me up (ha ha punny) some Instagram likes, because as we all know likes are the only thing that matter in defining self-worth.
Well, enter a certain bikini website that shall not be named, but may or not be an incorrect spelling of a geometric shape. After identifying my favorite $90 bikini, I proceeded to checkout only to find that they were out of my size. More specifically, they were out of my size in the top but not the bottoms, which somehow made it a much more annoying, glass-half-empty type of situation. Now, I was about to do the normal thing and “X” out of this page and move on to a new website, when I noticed a little “chat” box in the bottom left corner. I could chat with a customer sales rep! Right now! And they would help me! So exciting.
So I did. First, I was asked to enter my first name, and in a really weird and semi-embarrassing moment, I decided to use a fake name. I use my real name on literally everything I do all day long, so I could not tell you why I felt that the one time I should protect my ~sacred identity~ was on a bikini website that only asks for your first name.
So I said my name was Kylie (I told you this was embarrassing) because I thought it sounded like the name of a girl who might buy a bikini online from a company named after a geometric shape. Like can we be honest for a sec, any name ending in -ie or -ee or -ey or -eeey or -ieie is like def better bikini material than my really generically spelled name.
“Kylie” was soon connected to a rep named Maggie, who followed her script by apologizing profusely for not having my size, and then asking me if I was sure about my size. It occurred to me that, never having tried on one of these mystical bikinis, I was not in fact totally sure about what size I would be. I relayed this info to Maggie.
Maggie asked me if I had a tape measurer that I could measure myself with. I said yes! Of course!
Disclaimer: I do not own a tape measurer. After 30 seconds of texting my roommates I learned no one in our house did either. But not wanting to disappoint my new friend Maggie, (I mean had already lied to the poor girl about my name – I needed to redeem myself somehow), I proceeded to scour my apartment for anything I could measure myself with.
Ten minutes later I found myself wrapping a piece of floss around my body. Meanwhile, every 3 minutes Maggie would message me “Are you still there?” “Hey Kylie – still there?” as if I was a victim of a deathly accident, on the verge of losing consciousness, instead of a girl standing alone in her room trying to determine how many inches a piece of dental floss was.
Eventually, I came to terms with the fact that a piece of floss could not tell me what my bikini size was, and I had to bid farewell to Maggie. Maggie told me she would email me if my size arrived sooner, and asked for my email, which I gave her. My email definitely contains the name “Abby” and not “Kylie.”
Maggie did not comment on the discrepancy.
A few days later, I found myself rushing to the mall in between classes to find a suitable (ha another pun) bikini. The irony, I know. I could have skipped lying about my name and wasting all that dental floss.
Lo and behold the only acceptable one was designed by KYLIE Jenner. Am I psychic?? Yes, obviously. I clearly predicted my fate. Everything in my life was supposed to lead up to this moment. So I bought the bikini and brought it to spring break. Also it was like $30 instead of $90 so thanks @ kylie jenner.
The moral of this tale is to avoid online bikini shopping, and floss, and overly eager sales reps that you meet via a chat feature, and also maybe lying about your name.