Zoe Zombie

During my lunch break on Friday, I decided that now would be the best time to go looking for a birthday present for a good friend of mine. Of course I knew that I was not going to find anything in any of the jewelery stores in the shopping center because they are all chain stores and sell quite generic things that you could find anywhere. It wasn’t until I got to Goldmark (yes, I am going to name names because this shouldn’t happen) that I felt embarrassed by one of the shop assisstants there.

See, my friend likes marcasite. Loves it, in fact. So of course I wanted to get something with Marcasite for her birthday. Although, you won’t find it in a lot of these chain jewelery stores because I guess… it’s too “vintage” looking for their bling shit. Either way, I went to Goldmark and could not find any pieces with marcasite. So instead of overlooking something, I decided to ask for help.

“Have you got anything with marcastie?” I asked the girl at the counter. She looked at me strangely and then said “What?”

I’m telling you now, if my boss at my deli job from back in the day (aka February) heard me asking a customer to repeat something by saying “What?” I would have recieved a harsh scolding and not heard the end of it until the end of my shift and then probably be gently reminded the next day to use “pardon” instead.

“Marcasite.” I repeated.

“What is that?” She asked me.

I have to admit, I was slightly stunned. I don’t really know why I just assumed that everyone would know what I’m talking about but if I am in a jewelery shop, then I kind of do.

“It’s a stone. Well actually it’s a metal. It looks kind of black or grey.” I tried to explain.

“Oh, you mean like Onyx?”

“Uh… no. It’s not totally black it kind of looks metallic.” At this point I spotted a ring on a poster behind her that used CZ’s but kind of looked like marcasite. I pointed it out to her. “It looks like that ring.”

She turned around and pointed to the earrings which had amythest in them. “You mean this?” She asked.

I avoided looking and behaving frustrated and shook my head politely and said “The ring, next to it. It kind of looks detailed like that.”

“That’s Cubic Zirconia.”

By this time I was about to just turn around and leave the shop without saying anything because it was obvious to me that she was hopeless. But then I tried to remember what it was like working in retail and how many customers probably thought that I was hopeless but were still kind to me anyway. So I remained patient and tried to explain what marcasite looked like.

Either she got frustrated with me because we weren’t going anywhere, or she was frustrated because she had never heard of marcasite she says, “I have never heard of that stone. I did a jewelery course and a unit on gemstones and I’ve never heard of it.” By this point, she just made me feel stupid. I could feel my face getting hot and flushed because I felt so embarrased. “I’ve been in this business a long time and I’ve never heard of that stone. It doesn’t exist.”

My face just kept getting hotter and I was about to thank her and leave when another sales assistant walked out from the back and asked, “What doesn’t exist?”

The sales “assistant” who was “helping” me looked at me to tell the other girl what I was looking for.

“Marcasite.” I said meekly. I was so embarrassed that this other one had made me feel stupid that I was almost convinced that I was and was sorry for even asking for her “help” in the first place.

“Oh yeah, it’s over here.” The other girl led me to the counter outside where there was a display of marcasite pieces. I didn’t feel I had to say anything to the other girl. I didn’t feel like I had to look at her or validate her at all. I am quite sure she went and told her friends at the back that I was mispronouncing the name and that is why she didn’t know what I was talking about, and that I probably didn’t speak English too well so her co-workers wouldn’t think she was the stupid one. Of course, that would explain why the other girl immediately knew what I was talking about.

I walked away, not being able to find anything, with my face still hot. I was still embarrassed and then I started to get pissed off, only to be distracted by a dress in a clothes shop.

I am of the female sex, that is obvious. But one thing that has always affected me is the bitchiness of women. Mind you, I am guilty of being bitchy. Especially in my younger years… the things that used to come out of my mouth – I was certainly on the path to being smacked in the teeth. After a while, I had a epiphany and decided that no one in life gets far by being bitchy. And no one gets far calling other women “bitches” for no reason. I found it easier to call women I did not know a bitch. But when a few people calling themselves friends did and said questionable things – it wasn’t hard to hold back.

On Sunday, I went to pay for something at Live Clothing in Perth. I saw that someone was already being served and that only one girl was serving so I formed a line. However, after 10 seconds of my line-forming, a young girl and her really short friend who I could probably hurt just by sitting on, came up and put their items on the table ready to be rung up. I was pissed off that she had pushed in front of me but tried to remain polite. I said “Excuse me, I was here before you.”. However you can say that nicely without seeming like a bitch to the receiver I am not sure. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes and said “But you weren’t standing here.”. Her short friend looked at me – giving me a sort of “ghetto” look which I’m sure would have involved a lot of “ho!” and “slut!” had I gone any further with this confrontation.

I was slightly shocked – although I was partly expecting it. It’s not hard to find young women who are genuinely nice but it is hard to find them in Live Clothing stores.

On a night out the week before, a “friend” started disclosing unwanted information to me about two close people in my life. I am being gentle. Because, by god, that sentence could read something far more malicious. Ok, so by “disclosing unwanted information” I mean she was having a bitch to me. And by “two close people in my life” I mean my boyfriend and my best friend. So now you can probably understand me just that bit more. It was unwarranted, and so was the surprising part of her rant – she was telling me lies about events or occurrences that happened right in front of my face – as if I had never been there in the first place. It was shocking and upsetting as you could probably imagine.

It is sad, I don’t really understand the need for dramas. Can’t chicks just get along? Can’t everyone just get along in general? So much stress and shit like this is because people have crap attitudes and obviously blab to the wrong person about certain things. Why are women so bitchy?

I came a little bit late to the Web2.0 party. To be honest, I had seen the characteristics of web 2.0 in a lot of designs and had liked the way they were colourful as well as clean and used white space well.It has now come to the point where it is being parodied because it is in every recent website and more websites are updating with these characteristics. Even this very website has some of the design traits of 2.0. Click here to search “Web 2.0 website generator“, click on one of the pretty links and you will see what I am talking about in regards to design traits.

However, Web 2.0 is not only a design trend, but also a trend of the internet. Blogs, podcasting, myspace, youtube etc – all that shit helps make up 2.0. Think of it as allowing users to have the most “control” (aka – controlled sense of control) over these websites and share and collaborate with a community. Don’t be surprised if you get confused as to what I am talking about – it seems pointless doesn’t it? I mean, what was the internet used for before then?

So we can estimate that Web 2.0 has been carrying on for about 2+ years. Or at least around the time myspace started, let’s just say. Since then, there has been a slew of websites all vying for your customer participation to share and collaborate with one another. However, it has come to the point where there are websites coming out that use the web 2.0 principle but are completely pointless.

Gleamd is a perfect example of this. My boss and I were both invited to Gleamd and were interested in the site, as we weren’t exactly sure what it was meant to be. After a while of looking for “more” to what the site actually had, we realised that it was a people tracker – not exactly like myspace or facebook but you include people on this site. I guess it’s almost like a wikipedia – but of people. Right.

Another thing that I simply do not get about web 2.0 start ups is that every single one of these websites is in a BETA version. Instead of 1.0 or what ever – it’s in BETA. It’s almost as if BETA is a name trend in Web 2.0. I am not exactly understanding what is the attraction towards the word BETA. To me, it screams “WE MIGHT CRASH ANY MOMENT”.

Pownce is another example of web 2.0 scrapping the bottom of the tragic barrel. I joined Pownce after scoring an invite to see what the fuss was about. Pownce is apparently the new name for Ccing in your emails. You can also send messages, events, files and links to people in your contact list in emails as well. Everyone shat themselves because Kevin Rose (dude behind digg) helped create this useless piece of crap. If Kevin Rose does it, it must have a point to it! EL. OH. EL.

The most depressing web 2.0 site of them all is Touch Graph. Just so you can map out the tragedy, redundancy and uselessness that is becoming web 2.0.