12 21

Right, Ok, this is a petty little thing. Hardly even really worth mentioning. But anyhow, since I am home at 9pm on a Saturday, perhaps even vaguely bored, ah, here you go.

When giving out phone numbers, people sometimes say the numbers in pairs "Twenty-two Fourty-five Sixty-eight eleven", instead of "Two Two Four Five Six Eight One One." This happens in the U.S. as well. I have heard people say a sequence of numbers in this paired-up way for addresses, bank accounts, all sorts of things.

But I have never been to a grocery store, neither in Iceland nor in the U.S., where the amount due was told to me in this way. That is, until tonight.

There I am buying some milk and chocolate cake, still a bit groggy from my nap, and the cashier says, extremely quickly, "tolvtvotugureitt" (twelve twenty-one). I could have sworn he was speaking Russian to me or something. When I asked him to repeat what he said, he said "Eitt þúsand tvóhundruð tutugur og eitt" and I was like, "That is not what you said the first time." Then his two friends, who were standing near the register waiting I guess for the cashier to get off work, they chime in, start saying the total really slowly, first in Icelandic then in English, and at this point I am getting a little annoyed, because it was not that I did not understand the second utterance by the cashier, I just wanted to know what in the world he had said the first time that so completely confused me. After somewhat bitchily explaining to the friends that I did not need the total explained to me, I turned to the cashier again and said "That is not what you said the first time what did you say the first time?" [All in Icelandic mind you, I was afterall trying to make a point!]. Then finally he said it the paired up way, and I understood him. Said, "Já, nú ég skil þig."

I am of course not angry or upset about it, except that the friends seemed to assume the problem was with my Icelandic language skills, when I can quite assure you that if I was buying something in the states and the person told me the dollar total in the form one uses to say the time, (Twelve Twenty-one) I would have also been confused.

It was not terribly fun, especially since I have in the past had pleasant chats with that same cashier.