Look at me! I'm gourmet!

Last month, I found myself in a Pizza Pizza. I don't really like Pizza Pizza pizza, but there we were and there I was with onion rings needing ketchup, or wanting it anyways. So I go up to the counter and I say "Could I get some ketchup, please" and the girl looks at me with confusion written all over her face and says "W-what?"

"Ketchup, please...Miss"
She holds up some barbeque sauce.
"Ketchup. Catsup?"
..."I'm sorry, I no understand."
Now, I wanted to try and explain what ketchup is, but where do you begin, really? If I said red sauce, she probably would have given me marinara.

First of all, how do you work in fast food and not know what ketchup is? Second of all, if you are going to serve fries and the like, why would you not have ketchup? Vinegar, maybe.

It shocked my party of three that there were people living in this city that had somehow escaped the knowledge of ketchup.

This week, I embarrassed myself while dining at a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown with my date. He was thirsty and couldn't "guzzle tea". Pop was clearly not the drink of choice and the bar was abandoned, so I ignorantly told him to ask one of the waitresses with suffering English for "COCA-COLA"...slowly sounding out the word as though I were talking to a deaf dog. Of course, there was a perfectly bilingual waitress standing behind me waiting to take his order. "Go up to one of them and say COCA-COLA", I said. I am rude sometimes and perhaps influenced by the ketchup incident.