side_show side_story in regard to health food grossness.
A few of my friends worked at the local VitaHealth selling cleansing kits that involved bowel flushing, all sorts of smelly powers, and ground up things. The health food store, at its peak, was very popular before regular stores started stocking vegetarian foods. So it started out as a place where all us vegetarians could go for a quick snack, and eventually some of my theatre buddies ended up working there. The store had a computer system that kept track of those with memberships - if you signed up for a membership you got a news letter and a little card the got you a discount off purchases. So this group of the sort of hippies that Pat comes from - you know, the people who use healthy living as an excuse to be scary controle freaks who want to know exactly what kind of pollen the bees were collecting to make the honey that they are buying? Yeah the group was this collective of women who were these sorts of people and they called themselves "The Friends of the Earth." Imagine a dozen women just like Pat, and imagine having to provide them with customer service for three hours only for them to leave the store with a small bag of the same wheatgerm they bought every week. The staff got pretty sick of all the nitpicking from members of "The Friends of the Earth" -and this is a health food store where the staff gets way more specific demands than most stores do, so you can imagine just how bad this group was. Eventually, the staff started calling this group "The Freaks of the Earth," as in, "Oh, no, here comes one of The Freaks of the Earth." The staff had a good chuckle about it, and then one day one of my friends actually changed the group's name in the store's internal computer system so that whenever anyone scanned one of these womens' member ship cards the name "Freaks of the Earth" came up on the screen for only other staff to see. Another chuckle for the staff. Then someone not in on the joke changed the system so that customers' with memberships got a personalized message on their receipt. The next time a member of "The Friends of the Earth" came in, their receipt printed up "Thank you Freaks of the Earth, we appreciate your business!" Awesome? Yes. It turned out that "The Friends of the Earth" boycotted the store in outrage and even wrote some deeply entertaining complaint letters in which the term "hate crime" was used.