Not a piece of cake

Proficiency at Deutsch continues to hover quite some distance out of my grasp. I would at least have hoped to be good at shop German by now, but even that is proving frustrating. This is largely because they have about 100 ways to ask if you want anything else, many of them longer and more complicated than would seem to be called for (‘Darf es sonst noch etwas sein?’ springs to mind).
Guessing is difficult since they seem to be fairly equally divided into phrases requiring a Ja or a Nein to answer in the negative, so the only way to be sure of not provoking a switch into English is to rush in with a ‘Das ist alles’ before they can throw a ‘Haben Sie sonst noch einen Wunsch?’ at you. This tends not to make bakery trips that relaxing, a factor I blame for coming out of one the other day clutching a cake with the unfortunate name of a Schweinsohr (pig’s ear).

I think that I might have a touch of Weltschmerz. I found out that a radio station a friend works for now calls its branches ‘profit centers,’ and I decided that capitalism has officially consumed all that is decent and worthy of hope in humanity. We’re all doomed.