Regina Phalange

went to ebano, one of my favourite places in the world (you should start your december shopping there now btw). was at the fruit section getting my usual tangerines and cucumbers. you know the drill: put your fruits in a bag, get them weighed and tagged at the back, then pay at the front. there was a guy looking for avocados and ube pears. you could tell he was shopping for someone, maybe a runner or a chowdeck order. no avocados, but he got the pears. by the time i got to the counter, he walked up holding the pears in his hand, skipped the line and put them straight on the counter while they were still tagging my things. the cashiers were visibly irritated but nobody said anything. so i told him, "i'll go first, then you go next. but first you need to bag them and get them tagged by the guy at the back." he went, came back with them bagged but not tagged. i showed him the tag on my tangerine bag and explained again. he went back, got them tagged, came back and dropped them in front of me again 😭 (please don't ask me questions, i buy a lot.) i told him again, "when they're done with me, they'll do yours." he took it all in stride. no attitude. then a song came on and i started dancing, he started dancing too, and everybody burst out laughing. for like 3 seconds the cashiers forgot they were looking at him weird. what stayed with me is that common sense isn't common, especially for the basic things. we all grew up differently. in a regular market, if you queue you're the mumu. you stand around the seller and everybody gets attended to. then you enter a space with different rules, and some people know them only because someone taught them without embarrassing them. i had almost the same moment at old english with a man who looked like he should "know better." i told him the same thing, that they'd attend to him after me so he didn't need to stand in front of me. he started barking like a dog. and you just know that's part of why he was frustrated in the first place. you can't go far if you won't take correction about something as small as order. that's the difference between those two men. we lose so many chances to teach each other and bond when we expect what we know to be common sense, and when we're too proud to take feedback. life isn't that hard. we complicate it when we demand things of a world we're not even willing to build.