Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Secret Meaning of "Enter" and "Exit"

Today, in honor of Earth Day, I am going to let you in on a little secret.
Certain words that you see on a regular basis have a secret hidden meaning. I am going to reveal it to you here.



You know how supermarket and drugstore and convenience store and department store and specialty store doors have the word "Exit" on the out door and the word "Enter" on the door you are supposed to go in? Also, you know how some doors to smaller shops say "Push" or "Pull"? You know what I mean, don't you? Close your eyes and I bet you can envision a specific door of a specific store right now. Go ahead, try it.

Well, this is what those words secretly mean: They mean "Go Back To Your Car For Your Reusable Bags!" So you should have a half dozen or so reusable bags in every one of your cars. Before you enter a store, just as routinely as you turn off your ignition and unbuckle your seat belt and make sure you have your wallet, you should grab the number of bags you think you will need plus one and take them with you. If you fail to do so, when you get to the first door you see and find one of those four code words, "Exit", "Enter", "Push", or "Pull", you should smugly remember that YOU know the secret meaning of those code words and go back to your car and get the bags.

If you have the bags and forget them in your car AND you fail to decode the secret hidden meaning of "Exit", "Enter", "Push", and "Pull", you should face the humility of your mistake and ask the clerk to allow you to put your stuff right back into the cart bagless and you should drive that cart to the car and stand in the parking lot and bag it into your neglected and forgotten reusable bags.

And after you unpack your reusable bags, you should remember to put them by the back door to grab on your way out to put into the car for reuse next time. Because this is also the secret meaning of the handle of your back door's door knob: "Remember to take your reusable bags to the car!"

I know, I am brilliant for decoding these secret meanings, and thank me if you must, but I would rather you just heed these secret codes and make the future earth a less plastic-litter-filled place. We need to get into the HABIT, people!

Okay?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

you will be proud to know that your eldest and I ALWAYS bring our reusable bags to the store. We've made quite a habit of it, and thus it has turned into a natural step of the grocery store process.

Don Zouras said...

My wife and I have been bringing our own bags to the grocery store for at least 4 years now. I actually prefer my reusable bags to the plastic ones. The only thing that I don't like is how puzzled the baggers at the store act. We usually insist on bagging ourselves, just to avoid that.

goprairie said...

My friend did not make the bagger aware of her reusables until they had several items in plastic bags already. She handed the cloth bags over. Instead of taking the items out of the plastic bags and putting them into the cloth bags, the bagger picked up the plastic bags of items and slid them bag and all into the reusable bags. I guess we need to train not only ourselves to bring the bags to the store but the baggers to ask first!

goprairie said...

Oh, and PUSH means Please Use Some Handy-reusable-bags-to-save-the-environment and PULL means Please Use Less-plastic-by-using Lovely-reusable-bags-of-your-own.

pjclancy said...

I'm getting pretty good about bringing my bags into the grocery store. At other stores, like Walgreens or Macy's, I'm still retarded. I bought a reusable at Walgreens once because I forgot, and the Macy's and other department store bags are pretty big so I save them for clean-out-the-closet-and-donate projects. But I'm still working on having my reusables with me at all times!