Chips

Our family eats tortilla chips.

We eat them:

• Plain at lunch with sandwiches (boom!).

• After school and work as a snack with salsa or guacamole (bam!).

• Sometimes at dinner underneath a beans-peppers-squash-soyrizo-melted-cheese blob—aka NACHOS!

All told, we eat about one bag of chips a week.

That doesn’t sound like much until you remember that there are more than 50 weeks in a year.

Imagine: one small family, stuffing 50 bags of chips down their gullets.

That’s some mad shit, right?

Yet we do it.

*

The chips we bought for years were FANCY.

You could tell because of the bag.

It said:

• “Organic” (seven times)

• “Whole grain” and “gluten-free” (three times)

• “Vegan,” “low sodium,” and “non GMO” (twice).

Most fancy: the (all-natural) chips were blue.

*

There are no blue foods.

This is a famous fact (and George Carlin comedy routine).

Even blueberries are secretly really purple.

So here we were, eating 50 bags a year of more or less blue unicorn sparkles.

And that was great.

Until something changed.

*

One day the chips didn’t taste the same to me.

Before they were textured.

Now they felt smooth.

Before they felt fresh.

Now they seemed processed.

The salt was saltier.

The oil was oiler.

The chips were still blue, but two bites in I felt like I was eating uncurled Fritos.

(The horror!)

Obviously, this was not the biggest deal. But—again—50 bags a year.

*

I figured the chips might be old or stale, but nope.

The “best before” date was three months hence.

And, when I opened a brand new bag, the Fritos funk persisted.

Was it just me?

(I had a terrible disease! I’d waste away and perish! This was the sign!)

Double nope. I asked my wife and daughter and they said: “I noticed it, too!”

(Phew.)

So I did the crazy thing that only crazy people do.

I looked up the customer service information on the back of the bag and wrote the tortilla chip company a letter of complaint about their chips.

*

Who does this?

Complaining that your fancy chips taste like Fritos is like honking a car horn in a parking lot.

It’s like taking five or more cents from a penny jar.

It’s like squeezing a child’s hand to try to get them to stop crying.

You can do it.

It’s not illegal.

But it’s still wrong.

And so I felt (approximately) 0.24 seconds of satisfaction followed by 18 hours of utter writhing shame.

Then I forgot all about it and we started buying a new brand of not blue but still very fancy tortilla chips.

(This bag said “organic” thirteen times—and the bag itself was recyclable.)

All was good in the world.

Until…

The original chip company wrote me back (!).

*

“Dear Jeremy,” I could see on my phone. “Thank you for your comments…”

I opened the message.

It was six paragraphs long.

*

Here was the second paragraph:

“We deeply regret that your purchase did not meet your expectations. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to respond. Please accept our sincere apologies for this incident. The satisfaction of our customers is very important to us, and we hope you will continue to try our products.”

Oh. My. Gorsh.

They were being so nice to me.

Even though I was a crazy person basically slamming a child’s squeezed plam into a car horn while snatching pennies from strangers.

*

The worst part was the end of their message.

It wasn’t an anonymous corporate sign-off.

It was signed—first and last name—by a human being.

Isabelle.

This dear woman—living, learning, loving, growing—not only had to read my complaint about tortilla chips.

She had to write back to me.

And apologize.

Maybe they had made bad chips.

But I was a bad person.

*

Over the next 18 hours, even more writhingly ashamed than ever, I readied my reply. 

“Dear Isabelle,” I composed:

“I’m touched and grateful to have received your message. It seems an absurd miracle to make contact in this way.

“Yes, I enjoyed your fancy chips. Yes, I ate a lot of them. And yes, something changed that made me want to write to you. But they were, in the end, only tortilla chips, weren’t they?

“I wish I never complained about the chips. I wish I never complained about anything.

“I promise you: I will be more patient from this moment forward. More understanding. More humane.

“Your chips may or may not have changed. But I know I have. Because you changed me.

“Because of you, Isabelle, I vow to be a better man.”

*

I couldn’t say that, though.

Of course.

Because there’s no such job as working in consumer relations relations.

So my words would come across as sarcastic.

It would be like I was fucking with her.

And maybe she—or at least her corporate masters—did appreciate my initial message.

*

People being crazy were a big reason the tortilla chip company employed Isabelle.

And if their chips started sucking for some reason, getting that feedback would be hard to hear but ultimately helpful.

Then they could investigate and fix things if there really was a problem.

Otherwise, the entire company might founder.

Inviting feedback like mine was a safety measure, or at least a safeguard.

Like car horns.

Like penny jars.

Like squeezing someone else’s hand.

I wasn’t a hero.

But I wasn’t a villian either.

I was just a guy who ate a lot of fancy chips and shared his story with another concerned party when that went sideways.

*

“As per our quality guarantee, please email a clear photograph of the expiry date and UPC sctions from the package,” Isabelle’s message ended. “We will issue a coupon for a replacement product of your choice. Please also advise us of your mailing address in the return email.”

I dug in the trash, snapped a photo of the bag, and emailed it in as requested, along with my address.

Who knew if we’d use the coupon?

But I looked forward to the mailing.

It could be the end of the story.

Or it could be only the beginning.