I'm probably going to get into trouble for this – but then again, is a life without any risks really worth living? I believe women's clothes should have more pockets.
The reason for this belief is fairly simple and came to me fairly recently as a result of an incident that happened while I was out in a mixed-sex group of friends and acquaintances.
We were at a fancy new Cape Town venue where like everywhere in South Africa, and around the world for that matter, smokers are greatly discouraged. Therefore, throughout the evening, which included dinner and copious amounts of alcohol, every time we needed to puff those addictive little cancer sticks we call cigarettes, we were forced to do the walk of shame.
Now ordinarily, the walk of shame is done the morning after the night before. It is when one comes home dressed very obviously in last night's party outfit, at around the time the neighbours are having breakfast or getting ready to leave the house. At this point all their eyes are on you judging you for having way more fun than they ever do. You are supposed to be ashamed of creeping back home at an hour when other people are getting ready to face the day, and if you worry about what other people think, then you will be ashamed.
In our case, however, the walk of shame meant a stroll through the busy dining area, past the noisy bar and then beyond the staring judgmental eyes at reception to the entrance of the building, where the security guards eyed us with pity mixed with perhaps a little envy. All this, just for a few puffs of our cigarettes, before we had to walk back the way we came – I suppose, in the end, we did have the benefit of a little exercise.
On these brief safaris to the smoker’s corner just to the side of the entrance, we all (men and women) tended to take our packets of cigarettes, our lighters or boxes of matches and of course that vital and pretty much ever-present accoutrement of modern living – our mobile phones.
With every trip outside and partly in the assumption that other friends and colleagues at or near our table would notice if anything untoward happened, some in the group began to become a little lax about carrying their stuff back and forth with them. At one point one of the women in our group appears to have left her mobile phone behind. When we came back and she wanted to use it she found it was missing.
As you can expect all panic ensued with the poor woman and her husband running back and forth to see if perhaps she had left her phone outside where we’d been smoking. When they couldn’t find it, they tried to dial the phone’s number in the hope they’d hear it ring.
It would appear in this so-called digital age, someone had managed to carry out an analogue crime and had not just pinched the phone, but had managed to disable it and prevent it from ringing. The management came and were very apologetic and even said they would review the CCTV to see if they could see what happened, but all to no avail. The phone seems to have just vanished into thin air.
Perhaps if women’s clothes had pockets, such as those found on men's trousers, our friend would have put the phone in her pocket and never risked its loss. Of course if none of us smoked the issue would never have arisen, but why let good sense get in the way of a story?
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