I remember the good old days when you could walk into your local Brookstone and flop down on that Tempur-Pedic display bed for an hour and a half without a store associate so much as looking at you. Maybe they started some sort of commission system, but now I feel guilty walking into Brookstone and get three salesninnies waylay me with bizarre hybrid product abonimations of God while I know there's no way in hell I'd buy their mini-massager or indoor/outdoor weather station or talking picture cube or whatever other overpriced crap they've got there. I just went in today to sit in that massage chair, which — again, I hate my fellow human beings — I get carded for???!!! The following conversation ensued:

Salesgirl: Are you over eighteen?

Me: [pretty sure I know the right answer to that question] Yeah.

Salesgirl: What do you think?

Okay, she's not flirting with me; she's just totally unaware that they've had the same damn Brookstone chair in the store there for the past ten years or so and the sales pitch can skip the inane, gawking small talk because I'm no longer surprised that someone managed to stick a vibrator inside a recliner. I don't think I'm all that easy to mistake for a tourist from Idaho.

Me: It's comfortable.

Salesgirl: Just comfortable?

No, sweetheart, it's orgasmic the way the massage chair can't figure out how tall I am and periodically discovers a new pressure point. The chair is really just meh... comfortable. It's sort of like a woman you've never met before rubbing your balls: it feels good but it's still a little weird. I explain this to the salesgirl.

Me: Well, I'm not used to the rubber things pushing into my spine.

Salesgirl: Because we have some other models you can try out if you want.

Is she seriously trying to sell me one of these things? Or better question, has anyone ever bought a robot shiatsu chair from Brookstone? You go to your local Corvette dealership wearing expensive sunglasses and slick-backed hair and you test drive a sports car for the ten-minute adrenaline rush, but you don't have to take every car on the lot for a spin. And I'm a little put off by the fact that she thinks I'm in the market for a massage chair when less than sixty seconds ago she didn't even think the state of New York legally permitted me to even sit in the damn chair.