Joy Unconfined

The podling was doing her homework. I was relaxing quietly.(Read that… I was dozing off before I needed to get up and go to dance class.)

There is a jaunty “shave and a haircut” knock at my door.

I open it to find a young man who looks to be 18, 19 years old at the most, standing and facing me. Immediately he starts that rapid-fire, good-natured, hey-I’m-your-buddy and non-threatening chit chat that tells me, “Oh great. I’m about to get sold some magazines.”

Sure enough, he pulls out his little card that shows the points her can earn, and when he does he gets a trip to X and X amount of money and so on…

He’s smooth, though. Amusing enough that I’m letting him actually go through it rather than slamming the door without a word. (I have done this in the past. Learned it from my daughter’s father. It’s really very effective.)

He’s talking about all the places he’s been, doing this job… all the pretty women in California. (Supposedly he’s from Hawaii…)

Then the compliments start. He notices I have a child… that isn’t all THAT young… and yet guesses my age at 20, 21…

Yeah, buddy. Points deducted for inability to do simple math calculations…

Then he corrects to say… No… he’d guess I was about 26… his age.

Uh huh. I’m not buying what he’s selling. Nor am I buying his line of babble.

But he’s amusing.

About here… the podling appears behind me, lifts her arm… and shoots a stream of vanilla scented body spray at him. I don’t think she was deliberately aiming, but it ended up going directly into his face.

My child… just maced a dude at my door… with Secret glitter body spray in vanilla flavor.

Ok, she disappears, giggling. I am horrified. Slick is doubled over with his hands over his face, coughing and talking about how it stings…

Lovely. NOW I am obligated to interact with this annoyance even longer. I must give him a washcloth to try to get some of that crap off his face, out of his eyes…

I even feel sorry for him. After all, it’s tough to go door to door trying to sell people things they don’t want. There are doors slammed (I know about these), there are questionable pets to greet you, there are surly faces, grumpy people… and now an 11 year old sprays you in the face with sickly sweet chemicals!

But he recovered… thank God. And continued to try to get me to buy his ridiculous, uninteresting periodicals. I declined.

He then proceeded to ask if I would let him take me to dinner.

WTF???

I declined.

Got to hand it to him, though… even as he left, he wrote his name and number down and handed it to me…

This kid, who surely has far better things to do, is hitting on a woman who could probably be his mother. (I still don’t buy the “I’m 26″ bit.)

He left. I bought nothing. At least he was pleasant, even after getting attacked by a podling.

Sometimes life is too surreal to believe.

And yes… the girl and I had a nice long discussion of what is appropriate, what is not, and that we do not spray things at people just because we think it might be funny.

I still don’t know what was going through her mind.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 6:50 pm and is filed under miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.