a knitter navigates through life

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

do not trust them; they are not your friends

OK, well, maybe they are your friends. They are often some of the nicest, most helpful people you will meet. But you cannot trust them. They will try to lull you into complacency, their helpfulness a guise to make you let your guard down. That's when they strike, with their battle cry of, "Here, feel this. It's new."
I am speaking, of course, about the evil that is yarn store employees. Yarn stores know you. They have your number. You are weak and easily swayed in the presence of yarn. They know this. And yet, there are those rare moments when one tries to hang on to resolve (and the ability to pay the rent), and control one's yarn spending. Yarn stores hate this. That is why they have their secret weapon, the yarn store employees. They select these operatives for their helpfulness, knowledge, and sweetness of disposition. Often these people will try to befriend you and gain your trust, sometimes over a period of years, in order to further their evil plans: to make you spend way more money on yarn than is reasonable for the health of your marriage and your ability to eat food and sleep indoors.
I myself have had two recent near-attacks by yarn store employees from which I barely escaped. In the first, I entered my favorite yarn store, Knitch, only to discover, to my dismay, that the evil yarn store employees had arranged ALL of their sock yarn in attractive, enticing displays around the entrance. As soon as I opened the door, I became dizzy with sock yarn fumes. I regained control, reminding myself of the buttload of sock yarn I have at home, waiting to be knit up, and approached the yarn store employee, an astonishingly sweet and lovely woman with one of the most intelligent and adorable daughters I think I have ever met, and berated her for laying a sock yarn trap for me. She showed no remorse, and in fact responded with, "Oh, we just got a shipment of something new in. Come and see!" She lured me behind the counter and revealed a large box full of sock yarn, and when I showed weakness by exclaiming at the pretty colors, snatched up a ball and pressed it into my hands, saying, "Feel how soft it is!" Recognizing the battle cry of the yarn store employee, I dropped the yarn and backed away quickly, out of range of the sock yarn fumes. When I scolded her for her evil ways, she only laughed and used a pair of knitting needles to give herself devil horns.
In the second such episode, which occurred at my second favorite yarn store, Needlenook, I had barely entered the building when one of the yarn store employees, knowing my weakness for sock yarn, called to me that they had new sock yarn and it was so beautiful and I should go look. I barely fled with my fiscal solvency intact.
This is a warning to knitters everywhere: do not be fooled. Yarn store employees are not your friends. They are trying to weaken your resolve and drain your wallet. Beware!

A small sample of the beautiful, beautiful yarn that came home with me
through the evil workings of the Yarn Store Employee

2 comments:

Eve said...

Speaking as one of those evil yarn store employees, I must admit that of course we want you to buy the yarn! If you and the other knitters don't buy it, it will sit there on the shelf, beckoning to us until we swoon with the yarn fumes and find that indeed, I have bought 4 skeins of hand-dyed sock yarn in the past week. (This will be one of those weeks where I'm eating non-organic because it costs 1/2 as much.) So when I show you new sock yarn, it's really a cry for help. Please buy it before I lose all self control and purchase every last bit of it myself!

Anonymous said...

ah, yeah! You gotta watch out for Hallie too, she is one of them. Hallie pimped me my favorite knitting tee shirt a while back.

Course Stephanie only took about 20 seconds to sell my cousin Kathleen & I same lace mohair. She'd sat down to knit with us and innocently said "oh look at the new yarn Kim got in. I just had to get me a skein." Kathleen & I immediately started digging in the basket.

Sorry I missed the knitting night last night. I was so very very beat from long hours with The Harlot.