No English

One of my friends' favorite stories is about the crazy plot I used one day to prevent an annoying person from talking to me.

I was in line at the post office, and behind me was a man who was, shall we say, less than clean. He was probably a construction worker or a day laborer or something like that, and he was all sweaty and grimey from a day of fixing things. He was also a very social fellow, and was enjoying chatting with others in the line about absolutely nothing. "Boy they're slow up there, hot out isn't it?" That kind of worthless crap. And I could just sense that even though I wasn't paying any attention to him, his sights would soon turn to me.

And shocker, they did. After he'd gotten bored with the people behind him, he attempted to get my attention with the wonderfully astute observation "Mailing some packages?"

Now my plan up until that point was to pretend that the man didn't exist. If he didn't exist, then he surely couldn't engage me in conversation. But now he did exist, as he had spoken to me and wanted some sort of answer to just about the dumbest question you could ask someone with a STACK OF PACKAGES IN LINE AT THE POST OFFICE. So I had to act fast.

Now I have absolutely no clue as to what part of my brain made me come up with this, but I turned to the man and in a completely non-foreign accent I said to him "Uh, no english" and turned back around. It was most likely the stupidest plan I could have thought of aside from just throwing my packages up in the air and making a mad dash for the exits. I mean, I'm as white and non-foreign looking as they come. Couple that with a sentence spoken in a perfect American accent and there's no way that anyone would buy what I just said.

But he just replied "Oh, okay, sorry" and tried to talk to someone else instead. He actually bought it, for God's sake. Can you understand why I didn't want to make small talk with this guy?

I found it amusing later that as I was up at the counter, I was speaking obviously perfect english to the clerk, and surely the guy in line would have heard me.

Try this out in public sometime, let me know how it works out for you.