Sunday afternoon inanity

The scene: Taco Cabana at Thousand Oaks & Perrin Beitel, where we have our usual Sunday lunch date.

The players: Mother and daughter, obvious newbs and out-of-towners, so probably military family members.

The story:

So there I was, at the salsa bar getting my limes and trying to avoid being stepped on by an obviously-confused teenager.  Said teenager asks her mom, who's up at the counter still, what she wants.

"I don't know," Mom says, "Whatever says hot sauce.  It has to say hot sauce."

Daughter, still plainly confused, now begins to walk around the salsa bar, which for the record looks like this:

Of course, nothing says hot sauce.  Because hot sauce is this:

This is where I'm forced to note that I was kind of an asshole even when I was a teenager.  If my mom had ever uttered the words "It has to say hot sauce," when I was standing at a Taco Cabana salsa bar, she would have gotten exactly what she asked for: nothing.

The poor daughter was obviously a much better person than I, because she gamely made a couple of guesses, both of which probably wound up being wrong.  (She started to get pico de gallo to begin with, because it looks like what white folks are told salsa is--chunks of stuff, rather than, y'know, sauce.)  I reckon anyone who calls picante sauce "hot sauce" is expecting the ketchup-flavored crap they used to insult me with on the East Coast anyway rather than something actually spicy.