Bananas!

As usual, on Sunday we placed our order for the local grocery store to deliver a whole week’s worth of groceries at our doorstep. Digital age and twins – ah, what a combo!

We can no longer even imagine the pain and sweat involved in dragging all that food + mountains of diapers home by foot/public transport/twin-filled car. We just tap and swipe a bit on our phones, and it all takes care of itself.

The service costs about the same as a round trip by tram. Minus the pain and sweat. Win-win!

Well, almost.

On Monday evening, the awaited delivery man arrived, hauling half a dozen boxes filled with our online groceries and silently followed by the raised eyebrows of passing neighbors. Delivery at our doorstep is always a complicated operation, sometimes involving several elevator rides. (Our building has a small elevator!)

Once at our doorstep, the production line ran smoothly: I greeted the delivery man at the door, and passed on bag after bag to our toddlers who definitely weren’t going to miss out on being part of all this fun. Always the eager helpers, they emptied the bags faster than a squirrel could chew chestnuts.

Hubby was at the other end of the production line, packing away the items our toddlers were handing him. Quite frankly, he was struggling to keep up with their incredible pace. The delivery guy left eventually and we kept unpacking. There was so much stuff! Quite different from my before-kids days: we are definitely a family now, making family-sized purchases.

And then I heard, “But what is this?!”

I abandoned my position, halting production (our little managers weren’t too happy about this improvised break and complained a little), and popped over to the kitchen. Hubby was standing there, mouth agape, holding several bags of bananas. So many bananas!

“What the… butterfly?” (Our toddlers are learning to speak, imitating us. Better watch my language.)

“Did you order all these bananas?”

“No way! Did you?”

“No! I only ordered five. But… hang on… remember the other day when we were looking at the app and it said we had ordered 42 bananas? Then we fixed it to 5. Hmm… let’s check the receipt…”

Sure enough, the receipt confirmed we hadn’t bought 5 bananas. Nor 42 bananas. It said we had ordered 24 of them.

There it was, in clear writing, 24 bananas. Interesting…

We spent the next day wracking our brains as to what dishes we could prepare to use up all the bananas. Our conclusion: none. It happened to be Vappu that day, the Finnish spring holiday (aka May 1st) and we had other things to do than cook bananas. (I did make a berry-and-banana smoothie. The twins liked it.)

Seeing all those bananas on my kitchen counter, I really don’t feel like eating bananas anymore. Probably ever. Just the sight of them has me fed up. They are still there, turning browner by the minute, like a ticking alarm clock.

I don’t have a picture of a banana

And I’m too lazy to walk to the kitchen

So I’m using these random shots from my photo album

So, what else could I do? Obviously, I needed to pass the blame onto someone else, so I gave the store some feedback, digitally of course. After all, the two of us – hubby and I – both agreed that we certainly didn’t order this many bananas. The amount had changed by itself all of a sudden.

In my feedback email, I lamented that the food was going to waste because it was a quickly perishable product and there was no way we could consume them all. And that they needed to fix the glitches in their app. I tried to be polite but to the point.

The store replied to me today.

Their email said, “What a shame that you received too many bananas.”

And, “We’ll give you the money back in the form of bonus points.”

I had to laugh at the response!

Getting my money back in play money and star stickers is funny enough. (They were organic bananas and the bill was 10 euros but that’s not the point. If they offer online purchasing, it needs to function.)

What really got me laughing, though, was the first sentence in its simplicity. “What a shame that you received too many bananas.” 

As someone who used to read a lot of customer feedback emails for a living, I can just imagine the eye-roll going on as the person was typing this reply.

“The things people complain about! They got too many bananas, oh poor them! Don’t they have anything else to do but to write to us? Always something wrong!”

(Not that I’ll admit to ever rolling my eyes at customer feedback – the customer is always right, and I mean it quite seriously.)

Yes, this is just a first world problem. A digital world problem, too. But in a couple of days I’m going to throw away two dozens of brown and smelly bananas and it makes me sad to waste them like that. Someone far away grew them, someone else sold them, someone else shipped them, and so on. And all for nothing. To be thrown away.

So roll your eyes, I don’t mind.

Does anyone know of any good recipes for brown bananas that have almost gone bad?