Do you hate confrontation? Do you hate door-to-door salesmen? Do you have a somewhat peculiar way of speaking that leads people to ask 'Where are you from, anyhow?'
Then you have what it takes to pretend to be a Czech!
Here's the procedure...
You're puttering around the house, perhaps washing dishes while preparing pasta. Suddenly there is a knock at your door. Why, who could this be? Someone fun? Someone exciting? You hold your breath and open this portal into adventure...It is a large magazine salesman from Mississippi, attempting to earn points towards some kind of...thing...of some kind by selling magazine subscriptions and talking about good PR skills. He asks you your name, where you're from. What do you do?
Pretend you're a Czech!
The beauty of this is that very few door-to-door salesmen will have any idea what a Czech accent actually sounds like. So long as you sound somehow 'off', you can most likely get away with it. Smile a lot, look confused, shake your head and go back inside. It's much easier to weasel out of a sales pitch if the salesperson thinks you're from Somewhere Else. Your endearingly foreign confusion will throw them off their guard, and they will find it much harder to justify, even to themselves, an attempt to sell you English-language periodicals.
Or I suppose you could look through the peephole and avoid opening the door.
But it is fun to lie to salespeople.
Posted by aloysius at February 02, 2004 07:16 PM | TrackBack |Then, just for some extra, whacky fun, order a magazine and tell them you'll them you'll pay later. You, of course, won't and when they return to find out why you haven't paid, you can tell them "the Czech is in the mail."
Groan ...