The tie lady
Back in January I went with my dad to the department store to get a nice suit for interviews, which I am currently in the midst of. As clothes shopping experiences go, it was pretty typical: boring, annoying, awkward; basically, an onerous task to bear only out of necessity. But there was one bright spot amidst the monotony of trying out seemingly identical suit after suit: the tie lady. Yes, the store had an employee whose sole specialty, whose raison d’etre if you will, was ties.
And she was good at them, too. Apparently there’s a whole art to picking ties. They have to match with the suit, the shirt, and even the color of ones hair. Apparently you don’t want a tie whose stripes are too similarly spaced to the stripes on a striped suit. And you want some of the colors to match, but not most of them; the tie is supposed to stand out against the shirt, but not clash. My brief superficial glimpse at these rules implies the existence of a whole system of interlocking tie equations, with variables ranging from stripe width to stripe frequency to exoticness of the tie pattern. It’s a real science; it just simply hasn’t been formally studied yet. There’s a PhD out there waiting to be earned, if anyone’s interested.
But not only did she know ties, she cared about ties. She worried over optimizing the final value output of my tie equations to a degree several standard deviations above the mean for salespeople. She was Caribbean and spoke in a charming accent. And she was nice. Unfortunately, she was on the lower rung of the sales ladder (you didn’t think tie salespeople made the big bucks, did you?). She didn’t earn commission on the sale, versus the senior saleswoman who sold me the suit with much less aplomb and made a hefty sum. It’s inequality, I say!
I admire her for taking so much time to make sure everything was right with my tie even though she didn’t stand to gain anything from it. She could’ve simply just pointed at the tie tables and said, “Here are your choices.” But she didn’t. I guess she just gets lonely, sitting by the tie tables all day, waiting for someone to come along and need her help picking out that most useless of clothing items. Hopefully she’ll manage to work her way up the ladder and start earning some commission. Unfortunately, that means she will no longer be the tie lady, which will be a huge loss for us all.
