Observational Taboos

You’re at a supermarket and see some free sample cookies on a tray, hooray!   There’s a tong for you to use so you don’t touch the cookie with your bare hands, until you touch it with your bare hands .5 seconds later of course.  Everyone else in the store has touched those tongs seconds before they ate, and some afterwards as they go for sample seconds.  You can either use the tongs and be sure to gather everyone’s germs, or you can just take the cookie with your hands and get some weird looks.

You’re at a ball game and want a hot dog and a beer, and unfortunatley you need to go to two separate stands to fill the full order.   The hot dog lady has to take out the hot dog, put it in the bun and hand it to you.  The beer guy has to hold an empty plastic cup under a nossle.  They are almost equally mindless tasks with the scale of difficulty tipping towards the hot dog lady as it’s a two-set process.  Why then does the beer guy get a dollar tip and the hot dog lady get nothing?  Why does the pouring of alcohol inherently deserve an extra dollar?   If you don’t give a dollar you should expect a weird look.

You’re watching a soccer game, say France versus Canada, and you need to differentiate one of the players on the French team.  Convientely one is black and the other is white, no judgement being passed.  You can refer to the French player as “African American” to save face, but there’s a good chance he’s never been to either country/continent.  Or you could say he was black and get some weird looks. 

Sometimes the common sense option gets the weird look and I’m doing my best to change all three.