The Fitter

There are very good reasons why I never worked in clothing retail in my otherwise eclectic professional life.

First of all, I am just absolutely awful at judging people's clothing sizes. I'm also terrible at the kind of engaging small talk that allows clothing store employees to make people feel comfortable as they are trying on new outfits - you know, the kind of somewhat inane but friendly patter that gives you the courage to walk out of the fitting room wearing pants that are way too small in front of complete strangers.

You may be asking, "How do you know this if you haven't ever done it before?"

Aside from the fact that I usually trust my intuition in matters such as these, I actually did get a chance to prove to myself whether I was simply being paranoid and sociopathic or whether I had a legitimate shortfall in these crucial areas.

You see, as every new class rolls into the Glendale Campus to start their road to being a medical professional, they need to get fitted for their white coats as part of their orientation. There is actually a formal ceremony in October where they get to show off their white coats to family and friends, and it's this whole memorable scene where the MWU faculty actually puts the white coats on the new students as a symbol of their first step on the journey.

The thing is, it's not quite so memorable if your program's dean helps you into the equivalent of a four-person tent, or if your white coat is so small it looks like it was meant for either a child or a very exhibitionist disco dancer. That's where we come in - as students are picking up their materials and getting prepped for their academic year, we meet with them in the Wellness and Recreation Center to make sure their coats will fit properly when the cameras are flashing.

Janet Reiman, the Special Events Coordinator for the Glendale Campus, and Patty Ames, our Senior Administrative Assistant, are the ones in charge of this particular part of orientation. They are awesome at it, too - friendly, knowledgeable, and eminently capable of putting the students at ease.

My part has historically been "the gofer" - taking the supplies from our office to the fitting site, setting up tables, directing the flow of traffic, and so forth. I enjoy doing the menial tasks because it ensures Janet and Patty don't have to do them, and it also helps me to mask my utter incompetence at anything having to do with actually fitting people with clothes.

This week, however, I allowed myself to get suckered into running one of the fitting tables. Predictably, it was not a pretty sight. Perhaps it was the involuntary look of grim determination that I unconsciously wore on my face, or the way I kept suggesting white coat sizes that were almost always totally wrong for the person in question... but eventually the traffic at Patty's table picked up drastically, while mine was the province of folks who arrived belatedly and thus had no warning.

Bless Patty and Janet - they would see me handing a student a size that any rational person would immediately realize belonged on a Ken doll instead of a human being and quickly throw a subtle, "That looks a bit small," over to me before the poor guy would be forced to struggle to try it on in front of his peers.

And the students - the unlucky ones who stopped by my table and thus had to run The Gauntlet of Poor Fitting Choices - realized how badly I was struggling and tried to put a game face on and spin things positively for me. "Hey, I was planning on packing on a few more pounds," they'd reassure me when I matched them to a coat that would require them to eat six Baconators a day to fill it out.

When it was all over, all of the new students had their white coat sizes ready and visions of looking like a real doctor dancing in their heads. Me? I was just happy to be taking down the tables and pushing the cart. That stuff, at least, I understood.