shake your windows and rattle your walls

alternate post title: ... provided you are contrary.

Iowa, huh? No, seriously: IOWA. Home of the straw poll. Place That Is Not Heaven (At Least According To Kevin Costner). And so on.

Well, good for them! But I guess a people who are apparently accurately characterized by the line "But what the heck, you're welcome, glad to have you with us -- even though we may not ever mention it again" do seem like the sort who might well say "Marry who you want -- see if I care."

[applauds the midwest]

oh dear.

So to go with my purple spangly dress (pictures of which I hope to be able to post someday; it's a thing to do with camera cables), what is really required are go-go boots. I might also look into some clunky mary janes and knee socks, but this isn't really that kind of dress. This is, as sanj called it, a time-and-space-traveling outfit.

Anyway. I went google for go-go boots, and ( cut for first-world problems )

So I e-mailed the Queen place and called the Pinup place. I got a very pleasant-sounding young man on the phone and asked him about the calf circumference of these boots, giving a good deal of information from the website, since there was no product number. He clicked some things and said let him look into it, because he couldn't find the information either. (I'm prepared to bet $5* that he looked at the same website I was looking at, but that's neither here nor there.) I wanted the calf ... what was it?

me: The calf circumference.
him: Serk ...
me: The circumference. How big can your legs be before it doesn't fit?

Note that I did not say this snarkily; I was just clarifying for him. But he went away for a couple of minutes, and then came back and said:

him: It looks like about six inches.

[headdesk]

After another couple of minutes we worked out that he had only measured one side, or flattened the top of the boot and measured that, or something, and thus the circ was probably 12" or 13". But, dude. I don't expect everyone to have aced geometry or anything -- I certainly didn't -- but even if you don't know the word "circumference", shouldn't you be able to work out how to measure to see if a boot will fit a leg or not?


*Except in other news, I seem to have left my wallet at home this morning. Rar.