Gerty Goes Shopping

Gerty, like most women, loves to shop. However, Gerty is no ordinary shopper. You see...she's a compulsive purchaser of things that she can't afford. That in itself is not unusual. This is America and this country thrives on consumer overspending, does it not? Gerty, being a proud American patriot, does her part for her country in this respect, does she not? Yes and no. She does her patriotic overspending duty but part of what makes this ritual work for the US of A is that these thriftless wonders generally pay the bills they accumulate. Gerty don't play 'dat.

Gerty loves to buy very overpriced items - things that are as costly as they are useless - pretty much anything they sell on an infomercial. I once visited Gery's apartment to find that it was impossible to enter due the the volume of exercise equipment that she'd purchased from informercials she'd watched while "working" from home over a period of two months. She's the first to admit she has a bit of a struggle with her weight - especially around the mid section. So why not buy an Abdominizer? When it became clear that the Abdominizer was not as self-acting as the infomercial had depicted it to be, she realized that it would not work for her. I understand and I think we all can. After all, if you pay $500 dollars plus shipping and handling for a machine to melt your abs, the fat should melt off as soon as you turn over your credit card number, right? So when the Abdominizer failed to do what it claimed, she went for the Roller Abs. This promised to be easy. It was billed as not just "low impact" but "NO impact"! Who needs impact when they are trying to lose weight? One of the reasons we got overweight in the first place was because we're lazy and exercise equipment that actually requires movement or impact just doesn't work for people of our ilk. The trouble is...Gerty got this contraption with it's huge moving handles and extended foot pedals and it just was way too bulky. It looked much smaller on the sound stage in the infomercial. What the heck?
Next she decided to go smaller and get a couple of items that were not going to take up as much space: the Z-Abber and the "Ab Wheel". The Z-abber was Gerty's favorite because it required virtually no effort at all to use. Of course, it sent electric shocks through her body at a constant rate of 15 per minute, which may or may not have caused the benign tumor to grow to its current enormity within her tummy area, rendering the whole ab-shaping venture a complete waste of time. The Ab Wheel just hurt her knees, so that was that!

Were Gerty more entrepreneurial, she might have opened an ab studio in her living room, but that was not to happen. Instead, she just put all that crap in an air-conditioned storage unit in Westchester.