The bag nobody picked up

A new flavour of crisps arrives at a small shop near a school in Alexandria. The bag sits beside the plain salted ones the children have bought for years.

In the first week almost nobody touches it. The children come in, glance at the new colour, and reach for the bag they already know. The shopkeeper tells the delivery man it is not moving and he should take it back.

He is right about the week. He is wrong about what it means.

People rarely come to a counter, or a screen, or a gathering, hoping to be surprised. They come for what they already like. Offer them something unfamiliar instead and they will wait it out politely, counting the minutes until the thing they came for appears.

That is not a sign that the new thing is bad. It is simply what new looks like from the outside. Every flavour that children now ask for by name was once the odd bag nobody picked up. Every idea that now seems obvious was, the first time anyone heard it, an interruption.

There is no version of a new idea that arrives already familiar. Familiarity only comes later, after enough people have tried it, and that part cannot be skipped.

So a cold first week says very little. Of course nobody recognised it. It was new.