Cru Jones Society

 

I’m a very polite young man. I don’t ruffle feathers when I don’t need to and am largely inclined to go about my day in a very unassuming, congenial way. But that doesn’t mean I want to hang out and chat with every Tom, Dick, and Quasimodo I encounter as I’m taking care of business.

I’m not on Facebook because I believe I have the correct number of people in my life. I keep in touch with those I want to through various means, and everything else just sort of works itself out. And like Melvin Udall in As Good as It Gets, I find most small talk exhausting. I suspect many of the random people I encounter in a day mistake my politeness for an invitation to friendship, so I end up in some inescapable conversation vortex many more times than I’d like. Here are five bastions of unnecessary small talk that seem to drag on forever.

1. Convenience Stores

It seems like every time I walk into a convenience store no matter what time it is or where it’s located, there’s always at least two or three seedy-looking weirdos in there chattin’ up the clerk. You know, it’s the usual creepy, trailer park, vaguely criminal-sounding chatter that happens in every nickel-and-dime corner of the world. And it’s usually something about how the dude with the mullet accosted his landlord’s ex-girlfriend followed by how said landlord retaliated by throwing paint on the mullet guy’s muscle car.

And while lately this seems to happen most at the ghetto 7-11 by my office – there are some weird motherfuckers that hang out there, man – this is an epidemic everywhere. What is it about convenience stores? Is it having Mountain Dew, cigarettes, and Auto Trader all in the same building that draws these yardbirds in like moths to a flame? Is it like a bar for people with even less money than your neighborhood wino?

And why does this always happen when I’m just trying to pay for my fuel and maybe pick up a pack of smokes. Ideally, this transaction takes less than 45 seconds, but because of the bizarre prattle going on with this gaggle of freaks, I’m in there for about five minutes thanking god I don’t have to worry about collecting child support money from my lady’s ex-man. Someone’s always hanging out at the counter while you wait a few feet back holding your Altoids and your Grape G2 wondering if they’re in line. Once they step outside themselves for just five seconds, someone waves you over, and if you’re lucky you get away having only had to wait impatiently in line.

If you’re me, you’re carrying or wearing something that invariably catches the clerk’s friend’s attention that you have to fucking explain, ruminate about, or share in the joy of. I just want to get back in my car and drink this Gatorade. It’s hot out. I’m probably hungover. And I have no desire to talk about how the logo on my shirt looks like a BMW logo but instead of BMW, it says “SKA.” Furthermore, I have even less desire to explain what ska is to you. Just please let me go, go the library this afternoon, and look it up yourself. Then look up some porn. Consider that your reward.

2. Elevators

Here’s what I wrote about chatting me up in the elevator more than a year ago:

“I have no interest in talking to you while we ride the elevator. If we didn’t know each other when we got on the thing, I have no plans to know you when we exit. Watch the numbers change or pretend to shuffle through your mail again. I don’t want to hear a 6 second recap of your weekend or how the lady who just got off is going down for her morning coffee and cigarette. I don’t care.

We’ll never see each other again outside of this small, metallic, moving box, and I’m okay with that. My reasoning behind not wanting to talk is twofold: 1) As is well-documented, I’m a prick; and 2) Invariably you’ll start a story that you can’t finish before you arrive at your floor forcing you to either a) end it abruptly leaving me pissed off for the rest of the day wondering how that oh-so-compelling yarn you were spinning ended (and even angrier that I’m still thinking about it hours later);or b) you’ll stand half-in and half-out of the elevator awkwardly while you tell this guy you don’t even know a story you probably regret starting in the first place.

In the interest of everyone, just keep it to yourself.”

So why do I bring this up again now? Because ever since I wrote that, I’m pretty sure the universe is karmically punking me. It seems like every other ride I take now has someone in there just dying to chat me up. These people are usually friendly enough, but c’mon, can’t we just enjoy 15 seconds of silence together? Isn’t that when you know you’ve found someone really special? Someone you can share a silence with? Well, I’ll tell you what, universe: I’m that someone special. Share the silence with me.

3. The Post Office

The post office is a generally miserable place anyway, so every once in a while I appreciate some gallows humor from a fellow patron who’s read the change of address form to his left just as many times as I have standing in the interminable snake line. Something like, “Hey, with any luck someone will come in and shoot us any minute now” or “I’ve got 3 to 1 one of those clerks goes on break before we hit the Elvis stamps. Any takers?”

But mostly, when you stand in line near someone for more than 15 minutes (as is the case around Christmas) holding a package of some sort, you inevitably become self-conscious and feel the need to explain what it is and who it’s going to. You’ll get a nice rapport going with the lady behind you, and without fail, the conversation takes a serious left turn and becomes wickedly uncomfortable.

“Oh, so that sounds good. I’ll bet your step-father will like that. Where’s he live?”

“Staten Island. I’m sending this to him because he’s dying of cancer and I lost my job, so I can’t go out and see him. He basically raised me after my real dad died of alcoholism. So… it’s a tough time of year, but I wanted to get him something.”

“Yeah, well, Mr. 3000 is a great movie. Or so I hear. Happy holidays!”

Sharing at the post office leads to oversharing at the post office. You’ll find yourself thinking for days about that poor woman and you wouldn’t have to had you both just kept your mouths shut and tried to figure out how the rate structure works before you got to the counter. If you do, the post office blows up and turns into 25 giant gold coins. Obviously, no one has figured out the rate structure while standing in line yet.

In an ironic twist there’s a post office by my house that no one goes to. I’m serious, I was there four days before Christmas sending a Rad Racing t-shirt and Best of the Best DVD to Senor Limon and one other person was in there. It was like finding the delivery entrance to the magical world of Narnia. I was so pleased with the lack of customers during the batshit craziest time of year for mailing stuff, I ended up jabbering nonsensically to the poor schmuck who worked there. I realized watching him pull back from me slowly that he was the mirror universe Dagger. He likely works there so he doesn’t have to engage in mindless chit chat, and here I am, a man of similar disposition doing to him what bugs the hell out of me. I came to my senses, abruptly ended whatever story I was telling, and quickly left. I’ve been back since, kept the conversation to a minimum, and have a new favorite place of business.

4. Auto Repair Shops

I’m definitely in the minority on this one, but man do I hate talking to the auto mechanic. Grease monkeys always want to chat you up about what they just did to your car and I either don’t care, or am a complete ignoramus and have no idea what he’s talking about. In the case of the latter, I usually just put on my best poker face (aka “Hi, I’m a professional PR practitioner!) and follow along with whatever the mechanic says praying to God he doesn’t ask me something about my car I should know the answer to but don’t. In the case of the former, please just tell me what you did, what I need to do in the future to maintain my car, and nothing more.

I suspect mechanics want to discuss my car with me because they assume I’m interested. Because I’m a guy. They’re right on the second count, wrong on the first. It’s not that I’m disinterested in the maintenance of my car, it’s that I don’t consider car maintenance a joy or even all that interesting. Sure, most guys like to talk cars, but my yuppified chino/sweater/collared undershirt outfit should be a dead giveaway that I’m not a guy who gets his hands dirty on the weekends.

Yet there I stand getting pelted with a Gatling gun of gibberish about gaskets, sealants, and a zillion other car terms I can’t even bring to memory. And at this particular venue I’m getting doubly fucked. Not only am I having to endure a barrage of shop talk, I’m almost certainly paying out of my ass for the work too because I have no desire to learn how to handle most of this shit myself.

But Seinfeld’s right – a good mechanic is better than sex. And as soon as I find one, I’ll listen to anything he wants to tell me.

5. The Dry Cleaners

I’ve saved the worst offender for last. Although I haven’t picked up or dropped off my own dry cleaning in months since the cheap place is close to Lady E’s work and she handles it. And thank God, because every dry cleaner I’ve ever known has had a predilection for chatter unparalleled by anyone else on this list. I first noticed this while living with my parents. They’d send me to the cleaners near their house, and on one fateful day I made the mistake of wearing my Karl Malone throwback jersey. The scraggly middle-aged woman with brown teeth who worked there seized on this and immediately fired into a diatribe about sports. Somehow we ended up on the subject of noted steroid-user, convicted criminal, and all-around punk Bill Romanowski. Evidently this woman cried when the Broncos traded him to the Raiders and I then got an earful about every other transaction they’d made in the last five seasons that she viewed as either ill-advised, or in her words, “retarded.”

She kept me in this store for 10 fucking minutes droning on and on about the goddamn Broncos, 8 of which was spent by me half in the door, half out. Every time I tried to flee, she sunk her word claws back into my flesh and dragged me back in. I may be a bastard, but I’m not a fucking bastard, so short of just leaving while she was mid-sentence, there wasn’t anything I could do but stand there and listen. Thankfully another customer came in and I made like Usain Bolt in getting in the car. I came to find out later from a friend who worked at this particular store this woman wasn’t even regularly employed there, but she was in fact Ocko (sp?) from the factory. Perfect. A Broncos-obsessed ugly woman named Ocko who works at the dry cleaning factory. My lucky day.

After her, it seemed all my dry cleaning transactions involved a high school girl who flirted with me either because I was older or because she thought I might buy her beer or cigarettes, Hispanics who asked repeatedly about my Honda Civic, or middle-aged chicks who inquired about where I buy my assortment of colorful shirts. Aaaaaggghhh! Just let me go!

Thankfully I haven’t had to worry about this for months. God bless Lady E. If it weren’t for the absolute cavalcade of other reasons, I might just have to marry her to spare me from having to endure another in an endless string of mind warping small talk with the dry cleaners.

I wonder what else she can get me out of… That’s what marriage is all about, right? Maybe we should have a chat about that. I know a convenience store where we can reconvene.

edagger@crujonessociety.com