Day 84- Plethora

Sarah's brain strikes again.

One of my semi-frequent jobs at ACE is driving to the nearest dollar store and buying chips and cookies and snacks and coffee and creamer and sugar for the good people of ACE to snack on. Today was one such day! After completing my duties in the office, I drove my little car over to the Dollar store. We've had winter weather lately and even with pretty days like today, there were still dirty piles of snow all around, and the parking lot was full of grease-streaked puddles.

I had shoved the money in my back pocket but had the list in my hand, ready. It wasn't much of a list! I went through, remembering tidbits here and there- my uncle likes the garden salsa chips, and my aunt likes Fritos. My dad is a classic-chip kinda guy and doesn't enjoy stuff like Cool Ranch. Buying Little Debbies, one must keep in mind that "individually wrapped" is the way to go. And when it comes to cookies I just buy what I want to eat. 

I was waited on by a young lady and it made me feel kind of old. She was wearing dark clothes, had her eyebrow and lip pierced and her black straight hair hung directly in my face, her posture slouched. I was there once!!! I'm not so far from it now, but I felt old because I had to fight the urge to lean forward and pull her hair out of her face. Ahhh, what would 16-year-old me think of me now??

But I made it back to the store and distributed the goods. I'm fine with it now, but in the past these snack-excursions have given me great stress. So when I was done, I sought out my sister at the parts counter. I sauntered over.

"I made it," I bragged.

"I see that!" she answered. "Very good."

That's when I did it. 

"I got a plethora of snack food," I said, except, like the goddamned word "courtesy" the other day, my brain pictured it and I pronounced wrong. I said it "Pluh-THOR-uh" instead of "Pleth-ora." And I didn't think twice.

My sister smiled an odd smile, and tilted her head. "You know, you're usually right about these things, but I don't think that's how you pronounce it."

My brain twisted. I saw the word in the air above me. Oh, no.

"It's pleth-ora isn't it?" I said, squinting my eyes shut. "Well, shit."

She giggled. 

Just then, my dad came around the corner. It didn't take long to fill him in. He was soon cackling at me, my sister joining him. So did I, honestly.

"You know what?" I said in between hoots, "I am gonna look it up right this minute. There's a computer right in front of me."

"You don't have to look it up," my dad promised. "We know how to pronounce it."

I ignored him and googled it. The first thing to pop up was a Youtube video of how to pronounce it. (SEE??? I'm not the only one.) Sure enough, it was "pleth-ora". But my dad wasn't paying attention to the video. He was looking at the video view count. 

"NINETY THOUSAND geeks didn't know and had to look it up?" He howled. 

A little while later, my dad, sister and I were all back at the parts counter still,  working on individual projects. My dad suddenly remembered, "Mr. Montoya got his truck!" 

"Really?" I asked. Mr. Montoya is up front at ACE all the time and I'd been hearing for weeks about his fancy new truck coming in.

"Yeah!" said Dad. "Over $40,000! That is a PLETHORA of cash."

Later still, we were talking about getting new pants for the shop guys, even though we all agreed they had a plethora of pants already. Except, my dad insisted that when talking about pants "Plee-thora" sounded better for some reason.

And for the rest of the afternoon 'plethora' kept creeping its way into our conversations. 

I gotta admit, it was pretty funny. If my brain would just behave!

Sarah