It’s late evening, I’m in #wholefoods in London failing to find plums in the giant fruit section.

‘..excuse me, can you tell me where the plums are?’

She looks confused for a moment but then *lightbulb* and she says..

‘oh, you mean, err, like bananas?’.

She then mimes a banana shape in the air. It looked wildly inappropriate.

‘Er, no. I’m looking for plums.’

I tried to mime ‘plums’ but that wasn’t helping and looked, if anything, even more inappropriate so i stopped. She still seemed baffled though.

‘..but they are yellow, right?’

‘well, they can be yellow, but not banana yellow. they can be purple or green too’

Then she played her ace.

‘have you looked in the cereal aisle?’

‘um no. would plums be there?’

‘yeah, I expect they are there if we have.. umm..’.

‘..plums’

‘yes, those. the cereal aisle is across to the left’.

I wandered to the cereal aisle. Unsurprisingly it had a total and complete absence of plums. Not even a wizened old dried prune did I find there, in the aisle of cereals. I trudged back to her; she was unpacking oranges, a fruit she was apparently familiar with.

‘nope, no plums in the cereal aisle - so I guess you don’t sell them?’

‘ah oh okay. could be that they are out of season’

’no, they are definitely in season’

‘..but they may not be. i expect that later in the..’

‘they are.’

She just smiled happily at me, clearly convinced this was the explanation.

At this point I had to just leave the store. She had totally defeated me. How can someone working in a fruit section not know what a Plum is?? I’m still in shock 3 hours later.