Wednesday, March 14, 2012

I'm not interesting

Dear reader, thank you for your patience. Seven months of writer's block and crazy busy life have left my little blog neglected, but not forgotten. Hopefully, we'll be back to regular posting.

I may have mentioned in the past that travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen were not a very politically correct community. We had all sorts of stereotypes about different types of people (wealth, type of car, neighbourhood, and yes, race, gender, and country of origin) to try to model our sales pitch or even give up at the beginning to save time.

One of the groups that we tended to avoid was immigrants. Not always, especially if they seemed really friendly, but as a rule I guess if English wasn't their native language it was just too much of a communication barrier against forming a trusting repartee to make a successful pitch.

One of the interesting little bits of trivia I never noticed until Mitch pointed it out to me was how different immigrants would tell you at the door that they weren't interested.

Not being interested was a very common situation for travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen to be faced with. A significant majority of the doors we would knock on would simply end with "I'm not interested" and there would be nothing you could do, especially if they closed the door after saying it. Not that I'd give up, mind you. Probably more than half of my sales started out as "I'm not interested" too.

In fact, it seems like "I'm not interested" was a sufficiently important part of Western culture that it was one of the first phases that immigrants would learn. I don't recall a single one, no matter how fresh off the boat, who could't say it.

Not that they said it correctly, mind you. No sir. But what Mitch pointed out was the uniformity of the (grammatical? pronunciation?) error among various communities. Punjabis, Russians, Chinese, Koreans, Italians, and more would almost invariably tell me "I'm not interesting" or maybe "I'm no interesting".

Mitch, ever the comedian, would answer back, "That's OK! You don't have to be interesting. I have to be interesting. So mind if I step in for a minute?" It was a laugh riot, I tell you. I liked it so much, I started responding the same way to any foreigner telling me he or she wasn't interesting.

Not that it ever worked, of course.