Memories Monday

My dad used to work in marketing for a large supermarket chain, and would sometimes bring home new products to test out on us, his more-than-willing family (which wasn't really your typical American consumer family, being 40 percent immigrant and 60 percent first generation, but it's what he had to work with :-) That's how we got to be the first kids with Bubble Yum, with microwave popcorn, with frosting from a can. I'm pretty sure my brother Jason was a Pamper test-baby. Juice boxes, those were good. And that weird peanutbutter/jam swirl in a jar? Tried that, gave it the thumbs down.

When wine coolers came out, in the mid-80's, my dad brought a few home one day and put them in the refrigerator. The next day, when my mom was packing our lunches, she saw what she thought were bottles of juice and tucked them into our lunch bags. When I opened my lunch that day, my first thought was "Cool!" because we hardly ever got stuff like that in our lunches. Then I read the label and just about DIED. I shoved it back into the bag and walked it out to my car, and hid it in the trunk. And spent the rest of the school day panicking that I was going to get kicked out in my senior year for alcohol possession. When I got home I reamed into my mom, as only a teenager can do -- she was just as mortified as I was. Later we saw the humor there and kidded my mom about it for a loooooooong time. (My brothers' wine coolers never made it home. Still wonder what happened there :-)

But all that kidding came back to bite me later in the a**. When I first moved to the Netherlands I had a lot of problems with product identification, everything was just a little bit different and I spent hours in the supermarket, reading labels and translating everything. There were a few things I thought I just knew -- dishwashing liquid, for example. I used Ajax in the U.S. and just assumed it was the same here. It's not -- it's disinfectant, used for cleaning bathrooms and such. When I grabbed the bottle from under the sink, my first thought was -- hmmmmm, a little watery, but the Dutch are frugal.... I think I washed dishes with bathroom cleaner for about a week before Eric asked me what I was doing. And showed me where he kept the real dishwashing liquid.

I then washed everything in the cupboard TWICE, to get rid of any traces of Ajax :-)