Consumerism for Dummies

My new job requires me to lower myself into a tiny cockpit, fold my long legs into a tiny footwell, and listen to the repetitive beep of products going through a scanner, all the time struggling to concentrate on the task in hand. In fact, if you think too much, it leads to madness and error. It's best to glaze over and let the mind float.

For this, I had a total of 25 hours training. After day one, it deteriorated yet further and the levels of boredom rose to crucial levels. I tried to entertain myself by poking holes in the regime, questioning everything from The Company's "fair-trade" policy ("Are clothes emblazoned with the world-saving label still made in the crushing sweatshops of some third world dystopia?" I asked. The trainer floundered, merely patronizing by saying, "No, you don't understand. These clothes are fair-trade."), to the importing of out-of-season fruit and vegetables. I was a bastard, but I uncovered the trainers' flimsy reliance on company propaganda. This was not a place for free thought.

It was also not a place for enlightened though. At one stage the training session broke down into open homophobia.
"We get a lot of them in," said the trainer, a vicious, old and possibly menopausal woman. She swiped her flapping hand across her face. "You know?"
"No, I don't know," I said, deliberately wading into the forming quagmire. "You get a lot of whom in?"
"He-shes," the woman said. "Trannies."
I looked on, astounded.
"They use the women's fitting rooms," she continued with a mean snarl.
"I wouldn't think that they're allowed," a seventeen-year-old girl piped up.
"We can't stop them," said the trainer, eagerly spurred on by the ignorance of youth. "They're so flamboyant, they don't act like real women. They have no taste."
Before long we had a mini-Nuremburg. People were lamenting that transvestites weren't real women because they looked awful in high-heels, other people chiming up with terrible, prejudiced jokes - all using terms like "he-shes", or "chicks with dicks". I shuddered with every piece of filth that was thrown before me and shifted awkwardly in my seat.

Now, my job is serving old rich women. I scan their purchases, smile falsely and try to ignore their weird, overdone Gretta Garbo hairstyles. Wealth also seems to make people think that they are locked into a permanent youth, as there are other women who appear with oversized sunglasses and hideously inappropriate and revealing clothes, skin poking out everywhere, grizzly, brown and wrinkled. It seems that real women also have the ability to lack taste...