An interesting thing happened to me last week

I was in Victoria for a few days for a conference last week. We had the afternoon off on one of the days so I decided to walk downtown and catch an IMAX movie. I saw Bears, it was really cute. But on the way downtown, I recognised the distinct sensation of being peckish (ie hungry).
So I detoured through Chinatown and stopped at a little grocery store to buy a few pieces of fruit. I selected an apple, and I also wanted a banana. There were three bunches of bananas. Next to the bananas I saw a handwritten sign that read "Do Not Break". I thought of similar signs I've seen in stores that sell dishes and glassware or similarly fragile items, that read "breakages must be paid for", and I wondered what one would have to do to break a banana, and I felt sure that the risk of accidental banana breakage must be pretty low. There were no loose bananas, so I ripped one off the side of the bunch, since I only wanted one banana.
The man who ran the store came running out and said to me "Why you break the bananas?". Astonished, I realised that I may have just unwittingly committed a banana faux pas. I explained to the man that I only wanted one banana, so I had simply removed one banana from the side of the bunch. "But you break the bananas. Now I not able to sell the bananas!". I raised an eyebrow at this man and found myself slowly explaining that it was still a bunch of tasty looking bananas, and I could see no reason to refer to them as broken, and certainly not unsellable. I had not debunched any of the other bananas. In fact there remained three bunches of bananas on display, just that one bunch was slightly smaller than it had been moments before.
The man started to look a little red in the face, and I could see he was not finished with me. "But now it is not a whole bunch. People like to buy a whole bunch, and use it to worship the Banana God". Oh dear. I could see that I was not going to persuade him that the bananas were not broken. I thought about just buying the whole bunch, if only to prove to him that they were sellable (and to make peace with any angry Banana Gods). But then I decided against it, because after all I had only wanted a single banana in the first place.
As the man opened his mouth to say something else, I turned my back on him and walked into the store to pay the woman behind the counter (who I assumed was his wife) for my apple and banana. She smiled at me, and I think I saw a trace of sympathy in her expression, or maybe it was embarrassment. I don't think she believed in the Banana God.