The Nacho Agreement

There’s an unspoken agreement when you share nachos.

No one explains it. No one signs anything. But everyone understands, more or less, how it’s supposed to work.

You take a chip. You take what’s on it. You move on.

That’s the theory.

In practice, it starts falling apart almost immediately.

Someone licks their fingers and goes back in.

Someone touches a chip, thinks better of it, and leaves it there like they were never involved.

Two people reach for the same one and brush fingertips for half a second too long. No one comments on it. Everyone feels it.

And then there are olives.

No one wants them. They’re not part of the agreement. They just appear, sitting on top of otherwise promising chips like a small personal insult.

At some point, the distribution stops making sense.

One section is stripped bare. Another has all the weight. The center looks like a disaster site. Someone is quietly taking more than their share of the meat, but proving it would require a level of attention no one wants to admit to.

And then the bill comes.

Splitting it evenly feels inaccurate. Splitting it by consumption feels impossible. No one kept records. No one wants to start now.

So everyone agrees to something loose and slightly unfair, which is more or less how the whole plate operated from the beginning.

Because the nacho agreement isn’t really about fairness.

It’s about getting through the plate without having to discuss what just happened.