(no subject)

[which_chick]

So I'm at the grocery today, doing the more-or-less autocheckout. It's not entirely auto because if the store isn't horribly busy, the spare checkout people help bag your stuff... but I was the person scanning and weighing and coding in the produce and whatnot. So I'm there, all [keypad] 4959, enter quantity (2), put produce on belt, move to next item. I'm up to speed on the whole checkout thing. I'm da man and I'm down with the scan and all of a sudden the nice, grey-haired old lady who is bagging my groceries comes up to me with produce 4959 in her hand and she says to me "How do you do these?"



Er. There was a delay while I processed recent events. The processing can be summarized as follows:

A person was talking to me, has stopped, and is now wearing the trendy and stylin' wants-an-answer look.
She is a store employee holding a produce item that I just purchased.
I rewound short term memory, retrieved the question that was obviously asked, and assembled an answer.

For the question "How do you do these?", I came up with "You pick keypad and then you punch in the number on the sticker, there, see, it's 4959, and then it'll either ask you to weigh 'em or tell you to put in how many you have -- these ones asked for quantity -- and you do that and then it'll tell you to put the produce on the belt and you do that and then you can move on to the next item." Hell, I thought it was a reasonable answer to the question -- they're not a convenient size of fruit for shoving in various bodily orifices, so I figured the sexual sense of the word "do" was right out regardless of the age of the person in front of me and generally I don't expect that fruit needs instructions for eating. It's fruit, for fuck's sake. You eat it. Anyway, she was a checkout lady -- I figured she was concerned about the procedure I'd used to price them or something, like I would try to rip off Weiss for my fruit needs.

She smiled and said that I'd got it all wrong. I must have looked confused at that point because she continued, "They've got a big huge seed inside, right? Do you peel them or what? How d'you do them, I mean."

The light dawned for me. The checkout lady was not asking how I PURCHASED the fruits, she was asking me for instructions on how to eat them. Apparently she'd never eaten one and didn't know what to do with them and (reasonably) figured that if I was buying the damned things, I'd be able to give her a crash course in their consumption. So I did that, best as I could, while checking out the rest of my groceries.

Comments

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

Have you ever had lassi (http://www.hotdishes.com/mango_lassi.htm)? It's the absolute best thing to do with 4959's.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Nope. I usually just slice 'em and eat 'em. Sometimes, if I'm feeling really motivated, I make them into a raw chutney sort of a thing with a little cilantro and some lime and some green onions. The curds it mentions, those'd be like cottage cheese?

(I've got a blender, seems like I should be using it more...)