PEEK-A-BOO

Considering the pathetic conditions of my jeans, several weeks ago I went to a jeans boutique near my house to find a new pair.

The place was spacious, nice and tidy, the staff all very helpful, but I sensed something wrong when I was about to enter the fitting-cubicle. Knowing my own self too well, I quickly dismissed the feeling as the usual paranoid I suffer from time to time.

On the first floor there were 2 cubicles with carved wooden doors standing side-by-side, each bore a sign that said: 3 PIECES MAXIMUM(whatever it meant). Inside, it looked pretty normal, well lit and furnished with a large mirror and a big framed poster of a strikingly beautiful woman wearing a perfect pair of jeans. (I stood gaping in front of the poster, thinking: “All rightey, Matey, but you had those jeans altered, didn’t you? I’ve lived long enough to know that there aren’t such thing as perfect jeans”, but that is another story).

The wooden door is thick and cute; it didn’t go all the way from the floor to the top of the doorframe, though. It started like 15 cms off the floor (so when you are inside the cubicle, people outside can see your feet), and stopped maybe 20 cm below the top of the doorframe (lucky me, I’m not tall. So people can’t see my head from the outside, along with the frustation allover my face due to the unbearable task of finding a nice pair of denim).

But I did find a nice pair anyway. Ah, the bliss of a simple achievement. Happily walking to the cash register, I looked back and was mortified. Attached to the ceiling were 2 cameras, each pointing into one cubicle. That was why the doors were shorter than the doorframe, dear Watson.

Oh my. Looked like the cameras were dead, anyway, because I couldn’t see the red lights they usually emitted when they were working. And I didn’t do anything funny inside the cubicle, just the normal stuff people do when they are trying pairs and pairs of jeans.

But still, duh.