Perhaps I have offended!

We have a minor daily feud with the pastry class that works every morning in the kitchen next to ours. When clean-up time comes, some of the class want to use our big dish sink to wash their tools and equipment, to bypass the long lines at their own sinks. (OK, this is petty detail, I know. But they never come into our kitchen with any of their morning's efforts: the tit-for-tat that would make the whole process kosher.)

Today, Andy, working with one hand while his stitches heal, was rinsing dirty dishes while I scrubbed in the middle wash sink. Aaron (my new partner), on the other side, moved clean pots from rinse to sanitize. Andy began attacking a pile of bowls filled with sticky chocolate and custard, clearly not the remnants of our class work (today was miscellaneous grains, as you recall). "Andy, leave that chocolate shit," I said. "We gotta be eating their stuff before we do their dishes." "Oh, I'm almost done," he said, in his Minnesotan drawl. A few minutes passed, while we scrubbed, and then he said, "You surprised me right there. I didn't expect you to say that." OH DEAR. "I hope you weren't offended," I said. Aaron looked up, his glasses steamed up from the hot sink water, and said "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I was surprised, too."

Well, I don't want to fit into a stereotype. I guess surprise is good.

Or not.