Look, I'm thrilled you're here to buy seafood. I'm thrilled that, given that you have a choice as to who you want to hand you your slimy slices of omega-3's, you chose this fine establishment. Really, I am legitimately delighted with your choice. It's probably going to contribute to my paycheck somewhere along the line. Hell, if you keep coming back enough, said paycheck might jump up a few bucks.
But, and I'm only saying this because I want this fresh and fun little thing of ours to continue on past today, I think we need to lay some ground rules.
1.) Once this fish leaves the store, it is not my problem.
Again, I'm simply chuffed to bits that I'm the one handing you this fish, but let's make one thing very clear: the only thing I care about is handing you that damn fish so you can get on home and enjoy that smug sense of superiority I've always imagined people who eat fish to have. I don't want to lead you on here. I don't want this simple transaction to give you hope that I can and will engage you in a riveting conversation about how you are going to prepare that fish.
I cannot and will not. Hell, even if I could I wouldn't. The world is full of interesting things and you're wasting our precious time together telling me how you might be a bit naughty and sprinkle some lemon pepper on your salmon? Do me a favor and turn on the Discovery Channel or something before you come into the store. Talk to me about what you saw. Enlighten me. Make my day a little more interesting.
But as to how you're cooking it? Well, in the words of a great scholar, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."
You'll notice that there's a specification at the beginning of the heading that says "leaves the store" and not "transfers from my hands to yours". This is because, as shocking as I'm sure you'll find it, some of your fellow seafood enthusiasts have decided in the past, possibly mid-nose pick, that they don't want the fish that they just had me wrap up for them. Instead of politely returning the fish to me so that I can sell it to someone else, maybe even you, they chose to leave it on shelves next to dog food or in fridges next to the shredded cheese. Strangely enough, Tilapia doesn't go well with Alpo or Pepper Jack.
I know you aren't one of those people, so if you have a sudden change of heart, don't be afraid to come back to the place where we first met and give me back what I gave to you.
2.) I am not Gordon Ramsay.
In addition to not telling me about what you plan on doing with your fish, please please please don't ask me what I would do with it were I in your shoes. I know that the beard and the aura of raw masculinity might make it seem like I spend my days thinking up exciting new recipes for the fillet of salmon that I just gave you, but unfortunately for you and that remarkably off-the-mark imagination of yours that's just not the case.
Instead of telling you what my cooking prowess cannot do, let's take a look at what it can do.
My culinary skills require me to spend, on average, about 5 minutes picking through the cheese of the oven ready pizza I just cooked for little bits of melted plastic that I was either too lazy to or too stupid to remove from the pizza while it was still frozen, my signature dish is EasyMac, the only personal touch I've ever added to a food item was when I decided that I liked my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with more peanut butter than jelly, and until recently I think I honestly thought that since Wheat bread was brown it tasted inherently worse than its white counterpart.
I'd also like to point out that, if I wasn't contractually obligated to answer your questions to the best of my ability, I would let you know, just about every time, that a few years ago someone who was probably Russian started this thing called "Google" and you should give it a whirl.
3.) Get your hands off it, you bitch.
"It" in this case refers to just about anything within the market that you haven't expressed interest in. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the glass that we have to painstakingly rid of your grubby little handprints at the end of the night and the air on the other side of the glass.
That second part, before it got lost in the word-soup, was supposed to detail how I don't appreciate it when you point at things, especially while reaching over the glass that separates me from the outside world. Let me just say that whenever you do point at something in our case, regardless of whether or not your hand is on your side of the glass or not, you look like a massive dickhead.
Pointing at a fish in our case while saying "that one" or perhaps while somehow being even less helpful and just making a strained and slightly annoyed face does not tell me which piece of fish you want. Seeing as there are 3-4 pieces of fish in the area that you're pointing at, you're basically just saying "yes, that kind of fish. That one there that I just said you should give to me."
For the full effect of that last line, read it again in the voice of the dog from Up.
4.) This is a seafood market, not a political forum.
I don't know how things work where you're from, but a "political discussion" usually takes place between two people, most often when said people are on different sides of the argument. Part of that is true with us (the latter, if you're interested), but there is something blocking the other half from mixing together our dangerous cocktail of intrigue and opinion.
And that would be my contract.
If I hadn't pissed into a cup and signed a paper saying I wouldn't respond to your crackpot theories about who was really behind the Gulf oil spill (hint: It wasn't the government), I'd love to sit you down, open a nice bottle of wine, cook you a nice three course dinner, treat you right, maybe put on a little mood music, and thoroughly tear apart each and every aspect of your mind-crushingly dumb theory as if it were an ant colony in need of a good smiting and I were the cheeky little bastard with a magnifying glass. The kiss on the doorstep is optional.
Look. I am stuck behind a two and a half foot wide layer of what the tide dragged in for five hours of my precious life almost every other day. I really don't want to have to put up with your "unique and hard-hitting" opinions as well. What's that? The store is empty on a Sunday because people are praying extra-hard so that "Obama will fucking die" (actual quote, although (relatively) thankfully from a co-worker instead of a customer)?
Fan-fuckin-tastic. Take that one home to your family and friends. Maybe they'll listen to your truly inspirational ideas and not want to bound over the two and a half foot tall windows in front of me so I can wring your neck.
5.) I do not sell beef tenderloin.
I cannot describe to you how many times people have asked me about beef, pork, or chicken. Now, I could see the logic in doing so if I, say, wasn't surrounded by the most foul-smelling product legally available in supermarkets, seeing as I wear the same kinds of clothes as the people not ten feet away from me in the meat market, but unfortunately I am surrounded by just that.
If you ever ask me for something that didn't at some point live in water or was made to appear as if it did, I will smile, tilt my head to one side, and tell you that I've never heard of that kind of fish before. It's little thoughts like that that keep me from actually hitting you in the face with ten pounds of Halibut.
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