dumb questions to ask people — a working set i drafted at the cart

the cart was halfway full when i started drafting dumb questions to ask people, in pen, on the receipt. the supermarket failure happened later that hour. the spare key dave lost rattled in my pocket where it has not been for years. cereal is soup, by the way, and i wrote that down too.

i am back at the desk now. carla is upstairs at the annual planning meeting on the third floor, which gives me a window i have estimated, generously, at fifty minutes. the receipt is on the desk next to the keyboard, ink slightly smudged where my thumb sat. the questions, as a list, look more useful here than they did under the fluorescent lights of aisle nine.

this is, technically, an investigation into a working theory of dumb as a question format, not a personality. the people i tested these on, mentally, while pushing a cart, were not friends, not colleagues, not the man who calls. they were the strangers in proximity. the lady weighing apples. the boy stocking soup. the cashier with the lanyard.

nine minutes into the drafting, the cart’s left wheel began its small rebellion. i kept writing. the supermarket failure, when it arrived, took the form of three items abandoned at self-checkout because the machine objected to the bagging area. i logged that as research overhead.

1. dumb questions to ask people, the universal version

the universal version of dumb questions to ask people works on the principle that the asker should be slightly more confused than the asked. you are not testing them. you are sharing your confusion. this is the difference between a quiz and a conversation, and most of the internet has lost the distinction.

these questions are short. they end in a question mark. they do not require a name, a card, or an account. they are best asked in transit — in elevators, at bus stops, in the slow lane of a deli counter. the rule i drafted at the cart is: if a stranger could answer it without breaking stride, the question qualifies. if it requires sitting down, it is a different format. cereal is soup is, in this scheme, less a question than a thesis you can attach to one.

a brief reference: dumb and dumber as a framework asks questions of the same shape. *”so you’re telling me there’s a chance”* is structurally a dumb question, sincerely posed. i submit that for review. i wrote it on the back of the receipt, under the milk line.

2. items one through three, asked at the cereal aisle

item one, drafted between the bran and the granola: *”is cereal a soup or a salad.”* this is HT3 territory. the canonical claim — cereal is soup — does the heavy lifting; the question lets the stranger volunteer a category. i tested this, mentally, on the woman comparing two boxes of muesli. she would have said salad. i could see it on her face. i logged that without speaking.

item two: *”if i bought every cereal here, would the manager call it a hobby or a problem.”* this is in the spirit of the dumb diary, which i keep in a working ledger of investigations. the answer is a hobby up to seven boxes, a problem at eight, a personality at twelve. i did not buy any cereal. i was there for bread.

item three: *”do the boxes on the bottom shelf cost less because of the bending.”* this question failed at the cart because i could not find an honest stranger to ask. the boy stocking soup walked past three times. each time i opened my mouth, i closed it. by the third time, the cart wheel was rebelling and the question felt smaller than the issue. i wrote it down anyway.

3. items four through six, asked at the cart

item four: *”is a cart with one bad wheel a vehicle, a tool, or a complaint.”* drafted at 11:23, by the count i keep running on the receipt, with the wheel doing its small protest under me. the answer i would have liked, from a stranger, was a complaint. it is the most honest of the three. nobody around me wanted to commit.

item five: *”if i forget one item from a list of nine, did i shop or did i sample.”* this is the supermarket failure in question form. i forgot bread. i went there for bread. the receipt does not list bread. the receipt is, in this respect, a small monument to the gap between intention and execution. i wrote item five along the bottom margin where the barcode usually goes.

item six: *”is the self-checkout a machine or a member of staff who has given up.”* i tested this one on no one. the machine had given up on me first, when it objected to my reusable bag for the fourth time. dave would say staff. dave would mean it. dave would also offer the machine insurance, conceptually, which is how he tries to befriend appliances and why the seventh microwave survived as long as it did.

4. items seven through nine, the spare-key questions

item seven: *”if i carry a key i no longer need, am i carrying a key or a memento.”* the spare key dave lost has been in my pocket since 2019, by accident, and on purpose since 2021. it weighs nothing. it does not open anything in this building, this neighborhood, or this country. it is, by my pen on the receipt, a memento with a metallic edge.

item eight: *”who keeps the spare key after the friendship moves on.”* the answer is the person who lost it, then found it, then forgot whose it was. that’s me in this sentence. i did not ask this one out loud. it would have required context, and the lady weighing apples did not have time for context. she had apples to weigh.

item nine: *”can a single spare key qualify as a key collection.”* i submit yes. one is a collection of one. this is a math problem only if you treat math as a personality, which i don’t. the spare key dave lost is, on its own, the entire collection. there are no other keys in my pocket. there is, in the other pocket, sparky the fork with the black mark on the tine, which counts as a separate inventory.

5. items ten and eleven, the cereal-as-soup follow-ups

item ten: *”if cereal is soup, is the bowl a bowl or just a smaller pot.”* this follows from the canonical hot take, *cereal is soup with rules*, which i did not invent and will not soften. the bowl, in my apartment, is a bowl. the pot, on the stove, is also a bowl in a costume. i offered this distinction to no one in the supermarket. the lighting was wrong for it.

item eleven: *”does the spoon become a tool or a witness when the soup is cereal.”* the spoon is a smaller bowl, structurally, but in the cereal case it is mostly a witness. it scoops, observes, returns. the seventh microwave, which is now a coaster on the kitchen counter, was a witness for nine of the eleven mornings i drafted these questions in my head. on the tenth morning, it stopped working. on the eleventh, i wrote down item eleven and bought a different kettle out of guilt.

6. closing pulpit, the question is the relationship

the eleven items survived the trip from the cart to the desk because i wrote them in pen. the receipt is now logged as exhibit one of an investigation that is mostly about cereal, soup, spare keys, and the kindness of strangers in the bread aisle. the supermarket failure, if it counts as one, is that i went in for bread and came out with eleven dumb questions to ask people i had not yet met.

the universal version of the list — the one above — is the one i keep on the desk. the friend version, the partner version, the trivia-night version exist as separate folders, drafted on separate receipts, and they will be their own investigations on their own days. this one is for people. by which i mean: anyone. the lady weighing apples. the boy stocking soup. the cashier with the lanyard. the stranger who told me where the bread was. she was the answer to the question i did not ask.

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