#104, Two times I didn't argue with the guy

Two tales for ya.

We went to the New Balance outlet store to get shoes for the kids and me and I asked if they had the things to measure the kids’ feet. The guy goes, “No! But you can do our 3D foot scanner!” I said, great, let’s do it. By the time this conversation had happened the kids had all run away from me into the depths of the store so I was just like, OK, well let’s do my feet! So I stepped on the thing. The guy plugged an iPad into it and about one second later said, “OK, I have your results! Your left foot is about a size and a half larger than your right and it is extra wide. Your right foot has a very high arch.”

I said, “Wow, so what kind of shoes would you recommend?” Zero matches came up on the iPad and he said I could get the 880, “but we don’t really sell women’s extra-wide shoes so you would have to buy one shoe from the men’s department.”

My feet (both) are just a normal size 8, as I knew before I came in. I bought some size 8 women’s running shoes and they’re fine!

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Second story: I may have mentioned before that I really like Tony’s Chocolonely, particularly the White Chocolate Raspberry Popping Candy, which comes with a bright pink wrapper, and which certain other members of my family wrongly dislike because they think white chocolate is gross — “white chocolate isn’t chocolate, etc.” It’s very hard to find the white chocolate raspberry popping one in stores — it’s too good for the masses tbh — but for my birthday Kevin and the kids got me a few bars of it online. My birthday is in the summer and they arrived a little melted and we stuck them in the fridge, where they resolidified, a little bumpily.

Last month I went to Athens for work and I made a little plane treats backpack for myself, containing one of the white Chocolonely bars, a couple of books, and a New York Times Sunday print newspaper in a plastic bag. Going through security, this bag got flagged.

They go through everything — taking the newspaper out of the bag and going through it, unfolding every page of the New York Times Book Review, and they ghey get to the chocolate.

For the next 20 minutes, increasingly intense levels of security agents scanned the Tony’s Chocolonely bar with a special wand detector, then they brought it over to a faraway desk for a different examination. Then they bring it back over, take off their old gloves and throw them away, put new gloves on, chip the bar with a special tool, and slice it open in front of me, and spread pieces onto a card that is then put in a special machine.

They were very concerned about the chocolate’s shape. One guy goes, “I think this is just melted,” but the other one said to me very sternly, “Ma’am, where are you traveling today?” and I was like oh my God am I actually going to need to call a lawyer or something right now?

The sterner agent said to me, “I don’t think this is chocolate.”

Which I then almost got the giggles because the family joke haha is, you know, white chocolate isn’t chocolate. But also, I was increasingly concerned about being detained!?! Additionally, I became nervous that the “popping rocks” in the chocolate bar (pop candy, fizzy) might actually set off some sort of explosives detector.

Meanwhile, other people who were waiting for their own bags to be checked are standing near me and just keep murmuring to me, “They’re doing this with chocolate?” One woman said, “Do you think you would eat that now?”

Finally finally the chocolate passed its tests. The mean agent seemed totally disgusted and said, “Would you like me to wrap this back up for you?” and I said uhh…sure! He did a bad job and so I put the whole thing into the New York Times plastic bag and tied it up.

Here’s what it looked like after all that.

I did eat it by the way! And you know what it tasted GREAT! I showed this picture to a friend who knows more about drugs than I do and she said, “It does look like heroin.”

This is probably only the second funniest thing that has happened with Tony’s Chocolonely, the first being when they made woke Advent calendars that were missing chocolates on some days (to symbolize inequality) and parents complained and the company issued an apology (“We failed to consider the difficulties empty windows can cause for neurodivergent children and adults. We have more to learn in considering how we can make our products as inclusive as possible”).