In 2007, I walked to a convenience store close to where I worked to get a soda. I'd been in this store a few times and had developed a friendly familiarity with the sales clerk there. We exchanged our usual small talk and then, as I was leaving and about to issue a casual farewell statement as I walked out the door, my brain experienced a malfunction and went blank. I tried furiously to recover from this lapse in thought and grasped at what could possibly be acceptable thing to say as I was leaving. Fortunately, my brain was at least partially functioning and a handful of candidates presented themselves for selection. Flustered and flummoxed by my lapse in cerebral function, I didn't care what I said. I just had to say SOMETHING.

I learned a powerful lesson that day: When presented by a handful of candidate sayings to choose from and feeling generally ambivalent about all of them, there is an increased risk you might just say something that ends up being a composite of two or more of the possible phrases you have to choose from. That's what happened that day. I considered saying "Take it easy" or "Have a good one," among other options. What ended up happening, however, was I smiled, waved, and as I was halfway out the door, past some imaginary point of no return, I exclaimed, "Hey! Take a good one!" and walked away.

I think I started driving to a different convenience store that was a little further away from my office after that.