Help A Girl Out

Yesterday morning, after washing and moisturizing my face, a brief moment of panic: my make-up was nowhere to be found. I must have left it at the beach house.

*strikes the horrified Risa pose*

Bare-faced and intensely uncomfortable, I dropped the twins off at preschool. Rather than chiding myself for my vanity, I thought a gladiator does not step into the coliseum without protection. (I swear to God, that's what I thought). Because when it gets down to it, make-up is my armor. It is not that I feel unattractive without it; it is that I feel vulnerable. Which is no way for a mother of three to feel. (I don't remember what my excuse was before I had children, but...whatever)

So guess who was standing in front of Sephora—with Lea for a companion—when the doors opened at 10:00 am? Yes, that's right. I was greeted by a black-smocked Sephora person. I told her I needed to replace the contents of my make-up bag. Now, if you were a Sephora person and there were no other customers in the store and the woman who told you she needed to replace the contents of her make-up bag had a small child with her wouldn't you...

...hear the ca-ching of cash registers in your head?
...realize that it might be difficult for your customer to pick out several items when there is nothing for her child to do but "explore" all the colors in the little pots and palettes in the store? (Luckily, Lea took a liking to the crazy Euro club music they were playing and spent all her time shaking her butt in some kind of dance-trance bliss)

Unfortunately, this is not what happened. Despite several attempts on my part to engage someone's assistance, nobody was interested. I was extremely reluctant to reward the store and its lame-ass morning staff with such a large chunk of change, but I didn't have any options. Bah to the Sephora staff on Burlingame Ave.!

I am not unduly hard on retail stores. I ask only to be acknowledged and then helped if I need it. Having worked in retail for a few years out of college, I know this is not difficult to do. I appreciate everyone's need for a paycheck, but if you don't like to help people, maybe a store is not the place for you to earn it. Bah again!

That said, I once accepted a return from a horrible woman. She handed me a shirt inside a Zip-loc bag. She said, "My child threw up on this shirt." I thought how is that the shirt's fault? But I smiled and accepted the shirt—covered in vomit—as a return for cash. I once took the bus at 8:00 in the evening to deliver a $3.99 kid's sale sweater to the Pacific Heights frickin' mansion of one of my customers. I once called every "sister" store in the country to round up seventy-five hunter green sweaters in sizes M, L, and XL for a kid's chorus. But you know what? That was my job.

I'm just saying. Help a girl out.