Un-Tagged

Now they’ve taken all my labels away.

You know, the little tags on the inside of our clothes that let us know the correct way to put them on.

Label in front... wrong. Label in back….right

Now they’ve taken them all away.

Un-Tagged us, as it were.

What next…pockets?

Belt loops?

They call it tag-less.

It’s the new thing.

I call it taking my labels away.

Some genius decided that these little labels were an inconvenience and possibly an irritant…both emotional and physically.

Now they print them right on to the fabric, which you probably can’t see in the half light of early morning.

So you end up putting everything on backwards…even your Fruit of the Looms, which, to a guy, can be problematic…especially after two cups of coffee.

Just saying….

Why do they mess with these things?

Why can’t they leave well enough alone?

I mean, it’s something that’s worked for countless generations.

Throw on a t-shirt or a sweater; if the tag is tickling your chin, then you know it’s on backwards again.

Then all you have to do is curse yourself—mildly—(I mean it’s just a shirt) pull out your arms, spin it around and off you go.

Unless you’re a college student….

College students don’t seem to care what way it’s on. Just that it’s theirs.

Or someone’s in their room.

Or dorm….

Sure…there’s always the danger you could leave the tag sticking up and out in the back, rendering you unintelligent looking..

There is that.

And okay…sometime there’s a nasty little edge or wayward piece of thread that was spun from Desert Squirrel fur that sticks out and pokes the back of your neck all day.

At first you’re not sure what it is—maybe a bee slipped down the back of your shirt while waiting for the train—but eventually you figure it out.

Then you spend the rest of the day twisting and squirming, poking and prodding, trying to find a tactic to get the little bugger situated in a way that it's pretty much not irritating you anymore…or at least not drawing blood.

Kind of like you did with your co-worker in the next cubicle.

Of course,  now that you’ve spent about an hour arranging your clothes properly, you really can’t move…at least the upper half of your body…or else you risk messing the whole thing up.

Hey…nobody said there weren’t trade-offs in life.

That’s what voice mail is for.

However, if you don’t find this to be an elegant enough solution to the problem, you can always cut the tag out…but only as a last resort.

Sometimes cutting the tag out altogether, leads to a whole other set of problems.

For one, you risk leaving an even more annoying ragged little edge there, because you don’t want to cut right down to the seam line and risk unraveling your whole sweater. Plus you want to leave a little bit of the tag behind, for, you know, landmark front/back purposes, or else your defeating the whole purpose of the tag in the first place…let alone the premise of this treatise.

And what about those cleaning instructions.  How will you know if you’re supposed to dry clean only, wash with like colors—which I though was outlawed long ago…and rightly so—or lay flat to dry?

What are you supposed to do then…guess?

I guess….

I mean what could it hurt to dry vertically? I mean really….

So what if most of your clothes start to look grey?

Grey is good.

Nothing wrong with grey.

Okay…enough…I get it.

The way of the world.

Progress.

Labels have gone the way of detachable collars and cuffs.

8 track tapes and VHS.

Possibly even the Twinkie….

Too depressing to continue.

Besides I have to go fix my shirt.

Guess why….

Yep…it usually takes me at least two cups of coffee to realize I can’t lift my arms past my belly button.

I just hope I got the Fruit of the Looms right today….

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