Coincidence And Fate Figure Largely In Our Lives

glumshoe:

Sometimes I feel like I wandered into a sitcom with a laugh track plays at random, inscrutable times. Or maybe an alien that studied humanity and has a 95% understanding of Earth culture but that remaining 5% is enough to get them in trouble.

Last week I ordered a sandwich. The jovial man at the deli asked if I’d like a pickle with that. Attempting to match his casual, lighthearted demeanor, I said, “Yeah, sure. It’s a pickle kind of day.” He laughed. He kept laughing.

“Is it?” he wheezed.

“Yes,” I said, and attempted to mask my bewilderment at his amusement with another joke. “I woke up this morning and had a prophetic vision: before me sat my lunch, and with it was a deli pickle. It was fate.”

He laughed again and called his coworkers over to tell them that I had just said “it’s a pickle kind of day”. I shrugged it off and ate my lunch.

I just ordered another sandwich and as soon as he saw me approach, he waved a new woman over and said, “This is the pickle kid.” She looked at me and laughed.

“Repeat what you said about the pickle,” she said.

“No!” said the deli guy. “No no no no, don’t you repeat that out loud. Oh my god.”

“I have no idea what I said that was so funny,” I said.

“Sure you do,” he said. “Don’t play. You ‘don’t remember’ what you said about the pickle?”

“What, about the prophet vision, or about it being ‘a pickle kind of day’?”

They both doubled over and howled with laughter, staring at me incredulously. I felt lost. Have I somehow violated some bizarre cultural expectation? Some taboo? Am I invoking a meme I’ve never heard about? He acted like ‘a pickle sort of day’ was the most outrageous string of words he’d ever heard spoken aloud and spent a week telling his coworkers about me.

As I am a sapient living creature capable of imposing my will upon the universe through action, I have decided to have my revenge upon the deli man. I will conspire with my coworkers to make sure that all of us tell him “it’s a pickle sort of day” each time we order a sandwich. He will not escape the Pickle Day; lunchtime will strike him with his reckoning.