Wasting Time

My work bag, the bag I carried my books, laptop, lunch, etc. in, was slowly falling apart. I think I paid about $30 for it at Walmart 7 or 8 years ago. It had served me well, but it was time to get a new one. So about 2 months ago I started casually browsing online during my free time to see what was out there. I didn’t really know what I wanted. I knew I didn’t want a backpack. I often wear sport coats on teaching days and, although you do see people wearing backpacks with suit jackets, I’ve always thought it looked a little odd. I also knew that I didn’t want anything on wheels. You see these bags in airports all the time, but you don’t see them on university campuses. I wanted something that looked at least quasi professional, something that wouldn’t look out of place over my shoulder while wearing a sport coat, but I didn’t really know how big I wanted the bag to be or what sort of features it needed to have. So I started looking.

Somewhere along the line I found out about Timbuk2, a company out of California. They got into the bag market by designing bags for bike messengers, but I became interested in some of their bags designed for more businessy types. Shortly after I became interested in these bags, I began to notice that I would see Timbuk2 banner ads on all sorts of different websites. It then dawned on me that I was experiencing targeted advertising. Google must have tracked my searches and browsing behaviour and began to feed me Timbuk2 banners on different websites I browsed to. I’m not sure how disturbed I should be by this. On the one hand, I’d rather see banner ads for things I’m interested in than for, say, M&Ms or Norton Antivirus Software, but if Google is tracking my search and browsing behaviour, what other information is it gleaning about me?

Anyway, I made of a point of going bag shopping while I was in Massachusetts, and found some places that sold Timbuk2 bags. They seem like excellent bags, but their classic messenger bags that were stocked by most of the retailers I visited weren’t big enough and were a little to loud in color for my liking. Their “Commute 2.o,” a bag for more businessy types, didn’t fit my laptop, so I had to look for something else. I went everywhere. I went to a luggage store. I knew I didn’t want a wheelie bag, but I looked at them anyway. There’s another reason to avoid them. The wheel apparatus makes them so heavy that the carrying handles on them are pointless. Fill them with stuff and you wouldn’t want to carry them any further than you would want to carry a loaded small suitcase. I thought about a fancy leather bag, but I didn’t want to spend more than $200 on a bag that would be on the small side. After visiting about half a dozen other stores, some of them more than once, I settled on this bag by Jansport. I paid the $100 for the bag and then excitedly left the store to move the contents from my old bag to the new one.

I quickly realized that the new one was a bit smaller than my old one. This was a bit of a disappointment and, although I liked the look of the bag, the way it felt on my shoulder, and many of its features–a particularly nifty feature is the fact that it has magnets sewn into the top flap that keep the flap closed even when it’s not buckled, making it much quieter to open the bag than many other messenger-style bags that have velcro, a useful feature when you sometimes get to a lecture or talk a few minutes late–I felt myself beginning to sour on the bag just minutes after I purchased it, a feeling that quickly began to snowball. After having spent weeks researching bags and going to about every bag retailer within driving distance and then spending a not insignificant amount of money, I had a bag that I wasn’t immediately in love with. I told myself to try to keep an open mind. Maybe, I thought to myself, this bag would be just fine if I changed my habits a bit. Instead of having one bag that was often packed full and too heavy to be sensibly carried over my shoulder, I could transition to packing lighter with my new bag and just carrying a second, cloth bag with me for when I need to bring a few books home from the library or haul around a stack of a hundred student writing assignments. Having lived with my new bag for about a week now, I am liking it more and more. Maybe I didn’t spend $100 for nothing after all.

Anyway, that’s my completely frivolous post. And now that I’ve written it, I think it makes me seem a little girly; I just spent a half hour of my life talking about a shopping experience and, not only that, a bag shopping experience. Oh well, I’m comfortable in my own skin. I can handle it.