Ricing

I have said before that there are things that confuse me. I’m confused by spice racks. (More generally, I’m confused by the entire Retail Experience.) I’m confused by fashion. I’m confused by perfectly well thought out theories that suddenly (and catastrophically) fail. I’m confused by geography. I’m confused by health care.

Fortunately, un*x provides easy-to-use tools that tell me ‘confusion’ is a common theme in everything I’ve ‘published’ here. (Possibly even more common than ‘public urination.’ That’s pretty common.)

grep -i confus blog.postings | wc -l
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Yesterday I went to the supermarket; it’s just up the street — 2.4 kilometres away. (Before you ask — supermarkets confuse me.) Just as I got there and parked, my phone uttered its happy little ‘you have a new text message’ sound. (Technology confuses me.) Turns out it was from my cell phone carrier. They wanted to tell me that I had ‘ventured into an extended coverage area’, was now ‘roaming’ but would not be charged any extra fees.

The supermarket is ‘extended coverage’? It’s not another country or anything — it’s at the mall up the street. But you know what? If you treat malls, shopping and everything retail like a foreign land then that would explain a lot. I’ve long known that parking lots contain madness and trauma so I tend to avoid them. Apparently, though, epiphanies can also (sometimes) be found. I guess I’ll have to modify my behavior. Or think about modifying my behavior. Or something. Maybe.

Pondering this potentially life-changing insight kept me occupied while I shopped for bananas, berries and boxes that contained things that  started with the letter ‘b’. (Last night was a ‘b’ dinner.) While on the way to the ‘box’ aisle, I passed a huge pile of ‘b’ags of rice. On sale. ‘B’ig sale. ‘B’ig ‘b’ags. How big is ‘b’ig? ‘B’ig enough that each ‘b’ag probably contained something on the order of fifty meals. “That’s a lot of rice” I thought. “Even though it’s a good price, technically ‘rice’ doesn’t start with a ‘b’ so I won’t get any.”

That’s when I noticed something else: on top of the pile was a sign. Apparently there was a per-person limit of ten (10) ‘b’ags. So I could only buy five hundred meals worth of rice at a time.

Fortunately I wasn’t confused. Foreign country, remember?