Have you ever gone shopping for babies?
It can be a complicated process, especially if you start really thinking about it. You may put yourself into a baby's place, saying to yourself that you could do the job well, if you can think like a baby. So you go deep back into your subconsciousness and try to remember what it was like in those early years. Quickly you come up with a blank, unless you are one of those people who are reborn and have a very good memory of what you were up to in your previous incarnation - in which case you should definitely also remember what happened when you were a baby.
Assuming that you can't remember back that far, you may decide that you have 2 options:
1 - The baby really doesn't care. Its gonna cry anyway, so lets just get the essentials.
2 - You ask a friend who already did this, and he asks you to go to a one stop shop for babies.
The second option was the only option for me. So I happened to decide to go to the Baby shop in Center Point (Doha. Qatar). Actually who am I kidding; my wife decided and I tagged along.
In the first fifteen minutes I realized that a group of hedge fund managers had probably got together when they saw the stock market heading south, and come up with the concept of baby shop - or rocket scientists who were redundant after Einstein declared that time travel wasn't possible.
Anyways, the shop had everything that a baby could possibly need - absolutely everything from the moment they are born. What I really liked was the receiving blanket - the picture in my mind was that I was supposed to give this to the doctor to use to receive the baby at the time of birth. Then there were blankets for sleeping, blankets for not sleeping. Clothes while eating, clothes while sleeping, clothes while awake, even clothes while bathing!
I was new to all this - I just wandered around thinking how my mother managed without this shop. She probably just used one blanket for me, and I guess I had to bathe naked. Poor me.
And I am not even gonna talk about pampers here - that's a discovery that needs a complete section dedicated to itself. Suffice to say, for a mother, a pampers is the greatest discovery of mankind - ever.
After the initial wonder, I thought I needed a trolley cause I probably need one of everything, and I can't carry all that. So I looked around for a trolley. None around. So I headed back to the entrance and asked the Security. He pointed to a bag. Guess I was going to either decide to shop light, or flex my muscles today. Again, who am I kidding - my wife was with me, I was definitely going to have to do some weight lifting today.
I picked up some clothes and blankets and happened to find myself in the furniture / applications sections.
As I checked out the stuff, I thought it would be nice to have someone explain to us what most of these things were used for. As my generation was underprivileged and didn't have this stuff - I needed someone to hold my hand and show me how great this stuff was, and how they were going to make my life so easy and on and on. Hey, that's what salesmen were they for. So I looked around for one. And kept looking. No one in sight.
So I went back to the security guard, and on my way, I saw a salesman. I asked him to help and I guess even he wasn't sure of the stuff that I was looking at. Probably I was in the New Age Advanced Babies section. So he probably needed a New Age Advanced Babies section Salesman.
He went over to a corner and suddenly out came 4 guys. They were probably having a group update meeting on why the stock market was going down and why Gold going up. Definitely hedge fund managers.
2 guys headed in my direction. I asked them to explain how to use one of their products to me. It was definitely to be used for the baby's bath, but they were so many buttons and pockets, I was kind of sure that the thing could also be be used for orbiting the earth. You may remember the reference to rocket scientists earlier in this blog.
Anyways, one guy looked straight towards a corner of the shop and said the obvious - "its for bathing". I was polite and asked him to show me what the buttons were for and how to use the contraption. I didn't want my baby orbiting earth and bathing at the same time.
He kept looking towards a corner and added a couple of more words - "you can use sponge bed if you want".
Couple of quick thoughts went through my head:
1 - There must be a chick in that corner - no other reason he was staring there. Unconsciously I looked - no chick, hen or rooster that I could see. Maybe a spider or two.
2 - This guy was definitely a rocket scientist and he probably thought I was one too. People keep telling me I look like an intelligent guy - but this guy probably thought I was Einstein or something. So he was talking in code - which wasn't covered in my physics class.
By this time, my muscles were ripping from all the stuff I had picked up earlier and the visit to buy my baby some stuff was turning into a cardio exercise program.
I didn't want to explain that I had no direct relation to Einstein, and my muscles would probably wouldn't have allowed me anyways. So I decided to continue the adventure another day and made my way slowly to the cashier.
Concluding thoughts:
Babies today are gonna be spoiled. Baby shop sales men were too intelligent, they needed some people who weren't rocket scientists. And next time you need to hit the gym, just go to Baby shop, Center Point, Doha, Qatar.
