I once emailed Mentos via the customer service link on their website to ask what one should call a singular candy – A mento? A mentos? Here’s the reply, which I found archived in email:
Dear Andrea,
Sitting in the middle of the waiting room, gathering my things to leave, I heard a woman up at the counter say to her little boy, “Do you want to go say goodbye to the fish?” (referring to the large aquarium behind me). The boy said, “No, I’m scared,” and I shot one of those “aw, isn’t-that-cute” glances to the people around me. Then I got up, and just as I was going through the door to the stairway, I heard the boy say, “Okay, I’ll say goodbye to the fish now”, and I realized what he’d been afraid of: me.
I got in a car accident today.
In the car wash.
Apparently the old man in front of me jumped the track, so that his car wasn’t moving, and I was awoken from my car-wash hypnosis (does anyone outgrow the appreciation of car-wash sensory overload?) by the sound of my car gently rear-ending his.
All the lights in the wash suddenly went to red, the brushes stopped spinning, and a line started forming behind me. Since a massive brush had stopped right outside my door, I could only watch the expression on the face of the attendant as he surveyed the damage on the front of my car. I rolled down the window and he said, “Did you have a license plate on the front of your car?” “Did I?” I replied. He then produced a folded piece of metal from underneath my car. “Is this it?”
The attendant said it was the old man’s fault and instructed me to pull over and sort it out with him like we would in a normal accident. After folding the license back into shape, I realized the only damage was to the bracket that holds it on, so I asked the old man for $10 to buy a new one. That’s when the old man decided to give me some attitude and asked, “Why were you following me so close?”
(In an automatic car wash.)
I answered his question as politely as I could, and I got my $10.
I asked for help cubing some purple potatoes and carrots for a stew. Tim: “Oh look! It’s Andre Agassi colors!!”
