There's a new normal for Girl Scout cookies

It's Girl Scout Cookie time. Or is it? Who can tell? If a Girl Scout appeared at my desk at the office, I'd react like Scrooge seeing the ghost of Jacob Marley.

"You're not a real Girl Scout! You're merely a figment of my imagination, a fragment of underdone potato!"

By the way, I always thought that was a peculiar thing for the old miser to say. Indigestion has rarely made me hallucinate, and I doubt the ability of an inadequately cooked hunk of Idaho starch to summon the form of an old business partner, or cookie-selling girl. But let's say it's possible. I would be even more concerned if the costumed girl who appeared at my office cubicle said, "This year's new cookie is the Tuberdoodle! It's a slice of delicious raw potato between two shortbreads."

"I'll take a box. And some Thin Mints, which can't possibly be fattening, what with 'thin' in the name. ... Do you have any Samosas? Whatever those are?"

(Girl Scout ghost makes an unholy moan, rattles her cashbox.)

"They're SA-MOHHHH-AHHHHSS."

Could happen, but won't. There will be no Girl Scouts standing nervously by my cubicle, asking for my business. With few people in the office these days, the natural place for guilting coworkers into buying cookies has evaporated. This leaves the grocery store, I suppose, where you always feel guilty for walking past the hopeful faces. "Sorry. Not interested in giving you positive impressions of the free market today. Just here for some potatoes."

Think about it. Calling up co-workers with whom you haven't shared physical space in two years, just to exhort cookie-commerce would seem a breach of manners. A shakedown. In the office it is a part of the natural flow of society. Besides, when you see the parent and kid working their way down the aisle, you can stand up with a sheaf of papers and a furrowed brow, and leave with an air of great importance. Run away, in other words.

But if a kid calls you on Zoom and wants your order, you're stuck. Oh, sure, you can pretend that you have a bad signal, moving around in a jerky fashion and garbling your syllables before sitting absolutely still to make it look as if the stream froze. And then you disconnect and feel guilty. "I just lied to a Girl Scout." That's like cutting off a bus full of nuns in traffic. It won't put you in the lower circles of Hell, but you'll be in the small room where your shoes smoke.

People seem to like working at home because there's no commute and you can work in your sweatpants. Of all the repercussions of our new cultural paradigm, "fewer delicious cookies" probably is the least important, but to bring it back to Scrooge: There will come a time when we beg the Ghost of Future Cookies for another chance.