Unexpected

A friend at work said to me, "Having a conversation with you is like participating in a social experiment!"

I thought about it and know what she means.  I don't say what I'm supposed to say.  Rather, I'll say something unexpected or even shocking.  It is fun.  I watch people go pop-eyed for a second, then they smile.  It breaks the tedium of our existence for a minute.  In a way, they reinforce the behavior.  

It works with kids, of course.  "What are you looking at?" I'll snap to some staring kid, then count--one, two--and smile.  They always get it.  They smile, too.  

It works well in meetings when people of authority begin to pontificate painfully.  

"Wait!  I think your shoe phone's ringing."  

The others smile and chuckle with relief.  

But it can go wrong.  Terribly.  I was at Whole Foods the other night.  I had one of those handcarts and sat it on the conveyor belt and began to unpack it.  But the cashier kept inching it forward making it difficult.  

"Quit it!" I said.  

But I had not sized up my audience well.  She had an ideological haircut and a pair of fuck you glasses and looked at me as if she had just finished her Women's Studies course for credit at the nearby Junior College.  

"What did you say?" she hissed at me.

"Quit it," I said again.  

"Don't tell me what to do." She spoke to me as if I were principal of the Patriarch's Academy.  

And she was just warming up.  I wanted to pay and get out of the store, but she was in control of the conveyor belt, and she had quit ringing up my groceries.  I knew there was nothing I could say that would score points with the Whole Foods crowd.  All that was left for me to do was to scrunch up my mouth into a contrite ball and stare at the organic asparagus that sat dead still before me.  

I guess my friend should have seen me then.  I think she might have enjoyed herself.