You Looking At Me? By Rhonda Hansome

I had a creepy feeling years ago while shopping in a grocery store.  I was hungry in an, I don’t know what I want to eat kind of mood.  I decided to take my time perusing the shelves to see what would satisfy my appetite.  The eerie sensation began shortly after I stepped into the aisle.  I noticed a store worker following me.   I couldn’t help but notice because at just a foot behind me, I literally felt his breath on my back.  

I’d heard of people being followed in a tiny grocery store.  I’d seen TV reports and read newspaper accounts of numerous districts in turmoil.  Locals living with a relentless daily sense of interlopers profiteering among them, the disenfranchised.  That and culture shock on both sides created a decade long perfect storm of dispute, ill will and even boycotts.  The hallmark of this tension was people, in their own community, being followed in every corner grocery store.  I’d had a righteous but abstract indignation about the whole controversy until it happened to me.

I turned and the face that stared back at me made no move to hide that he was just doing his job, following me. That’s when it felt, just down right creepy.  So instead of looking for something to eat, I decided to just keep walking around until my shadow got tired.  After three tandem laps around the two aisles store, I realized he saw me as his ticket to

 So I left without a purchase as I navigated competing feelings of increasing hunger and creeped-out-ness.

That was then.  In store creepiness has reached a new level.  This is now:  ‘Mannequins Spy On Shoppers” 

The $5,130 Eye See Mannequin has cameras for eyes and software for brains - the better to record shoppers.  I’m talking sophisticated data collection here.  How many people look at displays and for how long, including race, age and gender.  Now of course my comedy mind races to find a tattletale, “I’m not your grandma’s dummy", dummy and spend the entire day donning various guises, changing ethnic and sexual orientation cues.   Ladies and gentlemen I’m a college graduate and that is my idea of a fun day, trying to get a rise out of an inanimate object.  At this point you may insert YOUR OWN sex in marriage joke!

Almax Research & Development will soon (if not already) employ technology enabling spy mannequins to RECORD YOUR CONVERSATIONS about the objects on display!!!  To assurances that all data collected is not maintained or used for other than marketing/advertising purposes; I say “Yeah, 

(sarcastic tone) right!”   This millionth example of everyday surveillance now ruins window shopping /store browsing with a friend my penultimate pastime, second only to an hour deep tissue massage with mani/pedi.  

Never again will I share intimacies or even recipes on a shopping trip.

Because a nearby mannequin will record my reaction to a ridiculous trendy out fit and the next thing I know I’m confronted with high tech digital recordings of my off hand remarks about the bull shit sequester, killer drone attacks, insidious racial profiling, economy debilitating multiple non-budgeted wars… Wait a minute.  All that can be found weekly right here on this site! 

(In my Emily Litella voice)

NEVER MIND!!