TikTok Shop
This is part of a longer story about post, the first bit of which I shared in November last year
“I’ve got a parcel coming on Saturday,” said Kay on Thursday. “I’ll be out, so can you please make sure that you’re around to sign for it?”
“Sure,” I replied. “Do you know when?”
“Yeah, the tracker says any time between 8am and 8pm…”
“But that’s the whole day!” I protested, looking up from my phone.
“Well,” she said, looking down at her phone. “The only other time for drop off was six in the morning, and I know that you’ll still be asleep then…”
“You’re right,” I said. “Thanks for thinking of me.”
Come the weekend, 19:45 and I’m sat in the living room watching for any sign of a van, thinking about how rich and full my day might have been if only I’d left the house. Truth was I didn’t have plans, and I don’t really like doing anything anyway, but even just the potential to do something is nice.
Can make a difference.
As it was, I’d done close to nothing, save for the few jobs that one does when left alone on a Saturday: jerk off, hoover the stairs, etcetera. I’d also spent about eight hours imagining what I might order from the Indian, but had committed to not pulling the trigger until after Kay’s parcel had been dropped off and I knew the evening was my own. These kind of day-long takeaway deliberations are I think a form of edging – a denial of gratification that allows you to prolong and intensify the pleasure of ordering dinner; while not necessarily masturbatory or pornographic in nature, there’s definitely something about the experience of scrolling through Just Eat, staring at the different categories and flirting with the more exotic options before landing on something comforting and familiar, and then making yourself wait, and wait, and wait for it.
Until you can’t.
So it was that I’d been thinking about sundries since midday and was on the brink, the sensation of peeling pristine cardboard lids from the grooved folds of foil trays already tickling my fingertips, the feeling of that sloppy, feverish, kitchen-counter mouthful that precedes plating up already pulling the corners of my mouth apart.
God, I love a Saturday tea.
It was 20:45 and I was starving hungry when finally the letters DHL filled the front window, wiping noiselessly into view like a PowerPoint slide.
“Fucking polo shirt wearing van driving cunt,” I muttered to myself as I walked to the door and opened it.
“Hello, mate!” I said brightly.
I’d been expecting the usual black and white ASOS pillowcase, and so was surprised to be handed a cardboard box with no labels or markings.
“Can you sign this?” the polo shirt wearing van driving cunt mumbled, waving a small bright screen in my face and then holding it too far out of reach for me to reasonably scribble on.
It felt like a challenge.
“Anywhere is fine…” he continued, now waving the device around, unable to keep the thing still for more than a moment as my raised index finger followed it around like a child pointing at fish in a pond.
Finally I lunged for it and left a faint squiggle that at least looked like it began with an ‘A’.
“First time,” I said proudly, and the man huffed as he left, seemingly disappointed.
Back inside I turned the mysterious box over in my hands a couple of times before leaving it on the side and reaching for my phone to order dinner; unable to deny myself any longer, finally I clicked the orange ‘Order’ button, my mind ablur with the image of future me hunched greedily over the white carrier and brown paper bag and its contents; the sweet grit of Peshwari naan on my tongue as it roves around my mouth searching for grains of pilau rice, tangy bright red sauce dripping down my chin with the afterburn of hot claggy chips in my throat.
Oh, you little slut! I thought to myself, grinning and heading back to the living room window to wait patiently with my hands on my knees.
“What’s this?” I asked Kay the next day, waving the nondescript package at her the moment she walked through the door.
“Oh good, it’s here!” she replied, looking pleased. “That’s my new defrosting plate.”
I scowled down the hallway, not quite sure that I’d heard correctly.
“It’s a what?”
“A defrosting plate, for defrosting things on,” she said, her smile fading as she spelt it out slowly for me. “A de-fro-sting plate.”
I lowered the arm that was holding the parcel to stop myself from throwing it at her.
“But you don’t ever defrost anything,” I said, handing it over. “You barely even cook. For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve never defrosted a thing. Not once.”
“Well no,” she said. “But now I can.”
A couple of weeks later I was working from home when there was a loud and continued banging on the front door.
“Can you sign this?”
It was the same bloke, holding a similar parcel but an even smaller device which he waved around more erratically than before.
It took me four attempts to leave a passable signature, and he walked back to his van with the same smile of satisfaction I’d worn a fortnight previously.
One-all.
On closer inspection this box was smaller than the first, but despite rattling loudly when I shook it I could gather no further clues, so went back to my meeting with nothing else on my mind until Kay came back from the office.
“Who signed for my parcel?” she started. “I got an email confirmation of delivery and it looks like Guy Fawkes signature after they tortured him.”
“I’ve got something going on with the delivery driver,” I muttered. “But never mind that. What’s in this one, magic beans?
“No,” she said, curtly. “It’s called LiLash actually. All I need to do with this is put a few drops on my eyelashes before bed, and it’ll make them grow longer overnight!”
This time I did throw the box at her, but only underarm.
That next weekend and there was another untimely knock on the door, this time on a Sunday night, and my patience snapped.
“Can you sign?”
This time the bloke handed me a lit sparkler and I scrawled my name out in mid-air for him, all too willing to call it a draw.
Barely back inside the house and I retreated to the living room, tearing into the packaging until little plastic parcels striped with foreign print scattered themselves all over the rug, revealing tiny pairs of translucent socks with pictures of cats and pandas on them.
“What in god’s name are these?” I exclaimed.
“Erm, Baby Feet,” said Kay, barely glancing up from the sofa. She sounded weary and exasperated, as if affronted by how ignorant and unfashionable I was for not knowing that for myself.
“You wear them,” she continued, “and after like ten minutes all the skin on your feet peels off.”
I left the room and didn’t talk to her for the rest of the evening.
I began to consider spending more time in the office midweek, and making weekend plans of my own, to avoid the trickle of Taiwanese rubbish that had gradually begun to flood the house. After finding a long read in the Independent about the rise of the ‘TikTok shop’ I’d realised what was happening; in much the same way that Facebook had polluted the minds of the over-sixties, we under-thirties were being sold bright ideas that claimed to make our lives easier, offering solutions where there were no real challenges.
Just lots and lots of plastic, with a zero returns policy.
But my not being home didn’t help things; didn’t stop these objects from turning up, being unboxed and dropped into our lives – to change and to improve them. My absence just meant that I missed the knock at the door announcing their arrival, and left me even more perplexed when stumbling across them in my day.
One evening, when washing the dishes, I came across a green, gelatinous dome made from silicone, resting on top of a dirty plate. I dropped it into the water and watched it float around the basin for a while before Kay came into the kitchen.
“What’s this?”
“Well, what do you think it is?” she asked me, smiling encouragingly.
I pondered the object before me, prodding it beneath the murky dishwater and watching it rise to the surface.
“I thought it might be one of those moon cup things,” I said.
“Look at the fucking size of it,” she replied. “And it’s bright green.”
“Well I don’t know what they look like do I? I’ve only ever read about them in the Guardian. And I have no idea what this is either.”
She sighed.
“This,” she said proudly, plucking it out of the water and holding it out on the flat of her upturned palm. “This is an Egg Cup.”
“Oh, it is, is it?”
“Yes,” she continued. “Yes it is. All I need to do with this is to crack an egg into it, drop it into a pan of boiling water, and then it will poach it for me.”
I blinked at her for a moment longer, waiting to see if any further information was forthcoming, but it was not.
“But that is what happens when you crack an egg into boiling water,” I started. “That’s literally the only thing that possibly can happen.”
“Well not when I do it,” she replied bitterly. “It always just falls apart.”
Now, while it is true that the Egg Cups do help the egg to maintain its shape in the water, what they absolutely don’t do is let Kay know when her egg has been sufficiently poached. And so I’ve spent many a morning since that particular purchase scrubbing rubbery slithers of over-cooked egg out of these things, like I’m working in an underfunded sexual health clinic rinsing out used condoms for reuse.