Back when I was in kindergarten, I was friends with a kid whom I'll refer to as "Stephen."

This will end up being relevant, I promise.

Stephen absolutely loved Cheetos. (There's some relevance already!) Whenever one of our classmates had a bag of the dust-encrusted snack in their possession, Stephen could be found hovering over that person's shoulder, usually offering hilariously unsubtle suggestions that he should assist with any eating-related tasks. This resulted in a quasi-serious practice of students actively hiding when they wanted to eat Cheetos in peace... but somehow, Stephen always found a way of sniffing them out.

One fateful morning, I was the one who had brought Cheetos to school. These weren't ordinary examples of orange-colored cornmeal, though: They were the "puffed" variety, and it turned out that Stephen – despite his purported connoisseurship – had never seen them before.

The following is as close to a verbatim account of our exchange as I can remember.

"What are those?!" Stephen asked me, equal parts awe and excitement in his voice.

I reluctantly responded with "They're Cheetos," then made a show of eating one.

"Why are they so big?!" The boy stepped closer, his eyes never leaving my hands. "Where did you get them?!"

Now, those questions were actually more reasonable than they might have seemed, because I wasn't eating from a branded bag: My mother had purchased a very large package of the chips (if you can even call them "chips") in question, and she had taken to doling them out by way of smaller, plastic baggies.

Had he been older, Stephen might have likened my parent to a drug-dealer.

Anyway, I replied by saying "I have a big bag of them at home." Somehow or other, though, Stephen interpreted this to mean that I was personally manufacturing the larger-than-normal Cheetos over which he was salivating.

"You... you..." he stammered. "You have a machine at home that makes them big?!"

Paragon of honesty that I was, I hurried to correct him: "Yes. Yes, I do."

Our exchange went on for a while longer (with most of that time being filled by Stephen trying to talk me in to "sharing"), but toward the end of it, I was encouraged to "use my machine" to make Cheetos that were even bigger. This put me in something of a pickle... so when I got home that afternoon, I immediately went to the cupboard where my mother kept snacks, retrieved the bag that had prompted my lie, then spent the next half-hour or so picking out the largest pieces that I could find.

By the time that my mother caught me, I had amassed what looked like a neon pile of cat poop on the dining-room table... and let me tell you, I had a hell of a time explaining why I was sorting Cheetos by size.

See? I told you it was relevant.

TL;DR: Snack-stealer starts stupid sorting scheme.