If you stop trying to sell me fugly stuff I don't want, then I might buy stuff from you more often.

Much to the detriment of my bank account, I supplement my life as a nerd with a slight shopping addiction. By slight, of course, I mean that I spend more money than I consume water. I always seem to have something that I desperately need, like the aforementioned suit, or desperately want, like shoes.
What pushy shop assistants have yet to realise, is that I will probably buy something from them if I am left to my own devices and don't have then desperately trying to make me purchase items that I wouldn't want if they paid me to take them.

Like the time when I bought my formal dress a few months ago- which is the cutest, pinkest, shiniest thing I have owned in my life, by the way.
"We have some cute Paris Hilton shoes on sale that would go absolutely perfectly with that dress," the vacuous looking shop assistant had told me. The words "Paris Hilton", "on sale", and "shoes" all in the same breath made that sentence the most exciting thing I had ever heard in my life thus far. Sadly, when she showed me the shoes, they were not only hideous, but also clashed horribly with the dress. When I tentatively pointed this out, she countered that my feet were all the way down there, so it wouldn't matter. I'm a big believer in the theory of feet being all the way down there so colours don't have to be a perfect match, but even I could see that the theory did not hold in this situation. And I have the fashion sense of Amy Winehouse on a bad day, so you can imagine what a horrible match the shoes and the dress were. Consequently, I left the store having not purchased any shoes.

Yesterday, in the same shopping trip that I attempted to locate a suit in, I also was in search of a silver clutch to go with my formal dress. I have my heart set on obtaining a massive clutch, and I will not rest until I manage to source one (not including all the times that I have rested since embraking on my search). I entered store after store and found myself approached by countless shop assistants draped in the lowest selling stock of their shops. When I would inform then of my need for a massive silver clutch, not knowing what stock they had in their own store, shop assistants would hunt through the entire store before producing something completely dissimilar to what I described, asking if it was close enough.
"Is this too small?"
"Is this too sequinned?"
"Is this too pewter?"
"Is this too white?"
"Is this too much of a wallet? And by the way, does it matter if it's black?"
"What about this nice leather laptop bag?"
Yes, someone actually tried to sell me a brown laptop bag in place of a large shiny silver clutch. And it was ugly. Do I really look that gullible!

Online shopping is starting to look like a really good idea. I might end up being shipped damaged goods that bear only a passing resemblance to the picture, but at least nobody will try to push me into buying fugly items that could never masquerade as what they are trying to convince me they are!