Zips. I am really fucking fed up with zips. There was a time when they’d never get stuck. They were reliable. Smooth. You’d plug the male into the female, exert a little downward pressure with the right hand, catch the lever on the slider with your left and pull in an upwards motion. Znnnnnnggggg. There was a quietly satisfying sound. And yet you didn’t think about it too much, because – well, because you took it for granted…
It wasn’t that it felt good. It felt natural. The zip would slide up beautifully until you stopped. Half-way up, to just above your solar plexus? Slide. Fine. All the way if it was your fly? Done! Zips worked.
Doesn’t it seem strange to be able to make such a bald statement, so full of innocence and youthful optimism. Zips worked. But that, my friends, was before zip Armageddon. That was before zips started to fuck up. Routinely. All the time.
You try to zip up your coat. No matter how sweetly you cajole the yoke it won’t go up. You push and pull, lean your head back and forward in case the tilt matters but the result is the same. It’s fucked. But it’s the only coat you have with you. And now it’s raining outside. And there’s a wind that’d batter you and go through like a 6 foot 6 mugger on steroids in dire need of a shot. You’ve had no breakfast. And sure as hell you didn’t pack sandwiches. And it’s halfway through your lunchtime already. And the nearest restaurant is half a mile away. But the fucking zip still won’t go up. Aaaaaargh!
It used to be you put a zip on something, you took on the responsibility of ensuring that it wouldn’t let people down. There was no point to a zip if it didn’t slide sweetly. That was the zip code and you knew it. A jacket with a zip that didn’t work wasn’t worth the denim it was made with. And as for a pair of trousers with a fly zip that wouldn’t close – unthinkable. Somehow, somewhere, along the way over the past few years that contract was rendered null and void. What had seemed like an essential truth about human life, and a bulwark against everything chaotic and unreliable in the modern world, was shattered.
Some people blame the demise of the reliable zip on 1968 and the effects of the student revolution. Everything went to hell in a handcart after that – or so the theory goes. Previously there had been an order to things. People knew their place. Teenagers did what they were told. So did women. And zips? They had a job to do and they did it and without complaining too. It was an open and shut case. The role of a zip was to go up and down as required. Or across if there was a pocket involved. And they were happy to do it for fifty years on the trot. No pension at the end of it either.
But when they got the smell of the tear gas in Paris they started to get ideas above their station. It may have taken a while – apparently zips exist in a somewhat different time-space continuum – but the word eventually went out among zips that the time was ripe for change. They never said anything. But once things started to go awry with zips, you could imagine what they were thinking. “I’ll go up when I want to and down when I want to.” “I’m not here to take orders from a jumped up bourgeois prick like you.” “Stop, you’re hurting me!” “Look, we’re going to have to negotiate before I agree to budge up or down.” “I don’t care if you just want to take your trousers off, I’m not co-operating. It’s not as if there’s anything in it for me.” “There are times when I just want to sit here and do nothing and have a bit of space to myself without anyone fiddling with me!”
But I don’t think it’s fair to blame the zips. They too are victims of the stresses and pressures of modern life. The constant frantic need to produce more and more. Intense automation. Faster turn-around times. The drive among manufacturers to increase profitability. Built-in obsolescence. Disposability. The idea that if it fails you can always just buy another one.
Page 1/3 <prev 1 2 3 next>
The Hot Press Newsdesk 
