Needed a sign for the “pomy” apples

After lunch I came back to the store and had to rage around for a bit at the front of the store wanting, nay, DEMANDING to know why, when we went to the trouble of calling a local supplier to buy stuff our corporate warehouse didn’t send us did we wait FOUR HOURS before a)telling a manager it arrived and b)stocking the floor with it. Especially since our district manager was in the store today. Idiots.

So one of them comes scurrying into the back to get a sign for these new apples we have in. It’s a three pound bag of what she’s calling "pomy" (pah-mee) apples. I asked her to say it again and she repeated it exactly the same way. Something was tickling the back of my mind but I couldn’t figure out what, so I asked her to take me out to the sales floor and show me where the pomy apples were since I’d never heard of such. She takes me right to them. The bag is labeled "Apples (Pommes)". OMG. I looked at the bag to confirm what was now blossoming in the back of my head and sure enough the whole bag is printed in English and French. I guess the local guys got them from a wholesaler that does business in Quebec or something, but I remembered the bags from last year, and the year before, and the year before, ad nauseum. I told her that "pomme" was not the type of apple it was, it was French for "apple" and she still didn’t get it, thought we needed a French sign for the display. I told her no, we didn’t , all we needed to do was get the English language sign that went with the apples. She told me we didn’t have a sign for pomy apples. I was doing really well not to scream at this point, but I managed to pick up a bag and read the tag attached to the twist-tie holding it shut and told her to get a sign for Gala apples and everything would be fine.

No, I don’t speak French. What few words I know in languages other than English aren’t fit for use in polite company. Except Spanish. That’s really coming along, now my Spanish is almost as good as Charro’s English…

The point of it is that she should have been able to recognize that there were two languages on the bag and look at the tag for the information she needed without getting all in a tizzy about it, especially since she’s been working in that department for almost five years now and has seen these bags before. I have no doubt in my mind that I’m going to walk in one morning and find a bag of three pound Granny Smiths labeled as Galas because she totally misunderstood and thinks the word "pomme" is French for Gala apple.

I really can’t wait to rotate out of this area….