had an ex a while back - yonks at this point. 4 years maybe? doesn't matter. anyway, this ex, he - yeah, he, this was back when i was still dating guys haha. anyway he bought me this drying rack specifically for lingerie at one point? not sure why, I never wore much lingerie. still don't. maybe he was trying to tell me something, but it would've made more sense just to buy me lingerie. didn't even know what kind he liked!
anyway, the drying rack - it was about the size of a normal clothes drying rack, big old thing just for lingerie, specially for a girl that doesn't wear much of it. Like. I'd need to go through a month of daily lingerie changes to cover it! well, maybe not a month, but at least a fortnight. wasn't immediately obvious what made it lingerie specific either. Just looked like a normal drying rack to me from the picture he sent. but supposedly it would only dry lingerie. sounds like a problem, not a selling point, but they were really trying to make it one. a selling point, i mean.
It was ridiculously expensive, too. I mean it was about a hundred and fifty quid, which is insane for a drying rack. especially one that can only do lingerie. especially for a girl that doesn't wear that! the company's website - i forget what they were called. something like "look fancy" but phrased weirder. anyway their website said that they had no control over this - which i don't believe for a moment - and that it was because of some old and obscure law.
we're talking *old* old. but apparently it was still technically in place. some law from the middle ages requiring markup on products liable to tempt people into committing any of the seven deadly sins. they claimed that a lingerie drying rack was too lustful to scoot past this law. strangely, I've bought far more lustful things for far less money, so i think they just wanted to scam people.
oh and i haven't even said the name yet. they called it "the dryngerie". that's not a pun, it just thinks it is! who names a product a portmanteau that doesn't even work! and i mean. i like a good portmanteau. i have a bit of a penchant for them myself - a penchanteau if you will - but this just doesn't cut it. it's like making a car that only goes slow and calling it "the moow" from "move slow".
anyway, i keep digressing. so he ordered this online, and about a week (!) later it arrived. and it was flatpack. i had to construct the damn thing myself. but it was just a box of more than 100 different tiny parts, and the instructions...
it feels charitable to call them instructions. they were encoded, somehow, for some reason. they were in a random order, for starters. sometimes what should have been several instructions was folded into one, sometimes what should have been one was split across several. a few were ciphered, one was backwards - three were missing entirely!
after about an hour struggling with the code, i decided to look online, found some people trying to do the same thing. a couple of them posted in forums asking for help and then just said they'd managed to figure it out without an explanation, fat lot of good they were. but i managed to eventually figure out everything and compile it into a single document. it took 4 hours. not building it. figuring out what the instructions were.
once I'd finally managed to compile the code, after hours piecing it together and looking up other people's attempts to do the same, i finally had a set of instructions i was ready to execute. So i diligently followed them, but at the end, i just ended up with a regular drying rack. nothing lingerie about it at all! after all that fuss my boyfriend made, after all that money he spent, after that pointless well of waiting. after all that, then I'd wasted all that time on the code, and all i got out of it was a sin tax airer
