Is a tag tracking your todger? No probs, just slice it off!

There’s something I’d like to show you in my underpants. Come along, now, don’t be shy. Take a good look.See how it dangles there getting in the way? And yet, at the same time, it’s a little bit stiff, isn’t it? This makes wearing tight underpants pretty uncomfortable, I can tell you. Pass me those scissors and I’ll cut the damned thing off.Stupid clothing labels.

Christmas shopping 2022 has confirmed my suspicion that sewn-in labels on new garments are bigger, sharper and more numerous than ever. Why?I don’t want to overblow the issue but that relentless, itchy, prickly, scratching sensation as the label slices through your skin and works its way into flesh is a thing of wonder. It remains possibly the most irritating and distracting sensation that a human can experience in the developed world, second only to having your earlobes repeatedly flicked by the school bully sitting behind you throughout morning assembly.I have known hardened men and women rendered into emotional wrecks by clothing labels at the back of underwear, shirts, tops, dresses and sweaters.On one memorable occasion, I was sitting among a group of friends on a train and observed, as the train set off, one of them kept tugging at the collar of his t-shirt. Was there a problem, I asked.“It’s this bloody new t-shirt,” he said. “I bought it yesterday and the label at the back is cutting into me.”As the journey went on and skin around the back of his neck became redder with scratching, his discomfort grew increasingly pronounced. Often, he tried and failed to join in with the conversation, each time quickly withdrawing back into his private hell, squirming in his seat, tweaking the t-shirt at the shoulders and grunting.Then the sweats began. He started fidgeting uncontrollably and tapping his feet. His eyes took on a desperate, crazed stare.He started rocking back and forth, humming “nnnnnnnn… nnnnn…” Then, when he could take it no more, he stood up and did one of those whisper-to-a-scream yells like “nnnnnnnnnnyyyyyyyyYYYYAAAAAAH!” – even Ingrid Pitt would have been jealous – before yanking his t-shirt off and scarpering down the carriage, still stripped to the waist, in the direction of the toilets. I think I may have heard him weeping as he went.Five minutes later, he wandered back calmly to retake his seat. His face was glowing red, as if freshly washed at a basin – as was indeed the case – and his hair wet and slicked back. He did not rejoin the conversation and none of us asked him what had happened, nor have we mentioned it to him since.He just sat there beaming with a relieved smile, wearing his t-shirt inside out.

Mme D used to titter at my penchant for conducting an immediate britt milah after every clothes purchase. She changed her tune after observing how labels on new clothing are getting rougher and scratchier with sharper edges. There are more of them, too, sewn in to various hems hidden all over the item, as if deliberately arranged so that you miss at least one.On one casual shirt, I found no less than seven labels sewn in a stack into the back of the collar alone, occupying a total thickness of 7mm by themselves. What were they for? We ran Google Translate on them. One of the labels contained just a solitary instruction, albeit in 37 languages, which advised: “Please read the label”.The washing instructions symbols were printed on a separate label on a side hem, specifically designed to chafe at the waistline.God knows what material these labels are manufactured from, either. Tungsten carbide? Kevlar? If they made them a little longer, I’d use them to slice carrots.Top military installations: don’t waste public money on erecting expensive razor wire fences! Just string together a load of t-shirt collar labels! That’ll slice up the peaceniks nicely for you AND provide washing instructions for removing the blood stains afterwards.Looking into the make-up of clothing labels, though, I discover that at least one label on every item in a fashion store chain contains an innocuous RFID chip. And I don’t mean the fist-sized plastic security tag. I mean one of the little cardboard labels strung on by that viciously sharp-ended plastic thread.RFID labelling isn’t for security. It’s for warehouse-to-retail management. Tracking the movement of stock then becomes largely hands-free rather than relying upon the laborious bleeping of barcodes with a reader. In principle, RFID tags can track a garment all the way from the shipping container to the customer’s hands – and further.

No doubt you have experienced this for yourself in high-volume clothing stores where the human-fronted cashiers have been replaced by automated till machines. You just drop the garments into the machine’s recepticle whereupon they are recognised and itemised on your bill; you just pay and off you go!

(That is, after spending another 20 minutes retyping your email address over and over again for the virtual receipt because there’s a latency problem with the touchscreen causing it to think your name is ALLSITTTATARI.)Even before you reach the till, though, RFID tags can be used to track stock in real time throughout the shopping day, with the store manager checking what’s going on from the comfort of his own iPad. Larger retail outlets are able to track what items customers have picked up or have put in their baskets as they browse between floors and wander from one part of the store to another.There are potential parallels here to the way that shopping centres offer (crappy, virtually unusable) “free” Wi-Fi whose true purpose is to follow my MAC code to find out which shops I go into and how long I spend in them.In theory – or it could already be in practice, who knows – an appropriately equipped shopping centre could continue tracking my RFID-tagged purchases after I have paid and left the store and begun strolling off towards the food court.The shopping centre’s data centre is now spying not just on the movement of the smartphone in my pocket but also what goods I have picked up and put down, the newly purchased contents of my shopping bags, and precisely what kind of frilly panties I will be wearing later.I bought it as a Christmas present, constable, honest.

Not wanting to go all Bill-Gates-Vaccine or anything but I assume these newer, thicker sewn-in labels contain an encapsulated RFID chip. Such a tracker hidden in an innocuous underpants label could keep tabs on my movements – ahem – between washes.Indeed, I expect there is an app already disrupting the market, tracking the relative arrangement of the contents of my underwear too. It could be called TklTrkr, complete with an accelerometer observing my todger placement and displaying it to me on my smartphone when I tap Find My ‘Friends’. Real-time updates will keep me informed as to whether it is slung to the left as usual or has made a sudden turn to the right.Of course, this isn’t going to happen if I keep hacking off the labels with scissors. So I’m hoping this might encourage the rag trade to develop label fabric that doesn’t slice and scrape and scratch and chafe and pull out the hairs at the back of my neck.You want to track my todger? Tag my nuts? The ball’s in your court. In the food court, probably.In the meantime, I declare the label rebellion open. Death to clothing tags! Throw off your shackles! Strip away the bonds!Get naked!