Shiny Thumb Incident

There I am, minding my own business, mindlessly wandering through the mall, feeling all superior about how I look down on wanton capitalist consumerism. And Lo! This young woman approaches, greets me warmly, and takes my hand.

She begins to explain to me that she wants to tell me about a great new product that I should know about, something that will endow me with the ability to give myself a professional looking manicure right in the privacy of my own home. As she's talking, she peels my thumb out of my clenched fist and begins working on it with something that looks to me like a sanding block. Only, she explains, it's not impregnated with aluminum oxide, but with diamonds. Then she switches to another side to buff my thumb nail, then to a third side of the block to "bring up the shine."

"Now look at that!" she exclaims, "hold your thumbs up next to each other! See how your left thumb doesn't have those ridges? See how it's all nice and shiny?"

Before I could point out that having shiny thumbs was never something I particularly desired, she grabbed a bottle of some kind of product off the table behind her, squeezed out a liberal blog into her palm, and then started massaging my left hand with it.

The smell hit me immediately. One of those perfum-y contrived smells I hate. "This is 'Aspen,' she offered. Men always like Aspen the best. We also offer Kiwi and Ylang-ylang.

"And now look! See how it made your cuticles go away? And without any cutting or pushing them back!"

Note that up until this point, I had not said one word to her. Not even "yes" or "no" in answer to her questions. I think that I was just offering stunned silence, but this didn't even slow her down.

She launched into the sales pitch, about how I could get all of the products she had just used on me And More, and that today was my lucky day because they usually sell the package for $59.00, but just for today, I could get it for $29.99.

"So you could get this great look at home whenever you want!"

I could just about see my reflection in my thumb nail. It was shiny and flat, looking sort of like the hood of a PT Cruiser.

Finally I spoke: "You... you made my thumb all shiny."

"Yes," answered, "and for only $29.99 you can keep this up! It should stay like this for the next two weeks though."

"But I've got a shiny thumb. It looks really weird. I have to live with this weird shiny thumb for the next two weeks?"

Without blinking, she dropped my hand as though it had been transformed into a dead eel. She stepped away from me and grabbed the hand of an elderly man, who seemed pleased and charmed by the gesture. I walked away from the young woman and her lotions and her diamond encrusted sanding block staring down at my newly shiny thumb.

I will never agree to bottom in a scene that involves thumb polishing. That is one of my hard limits from here on in.