Awkward Questions

Whilst at the hairdresser's today, I overheard a lady having her hair washed by the 16 year-old male trainee ask him "What do you like watching on telly?"

Mundane-ish question as it was, it was a million light-years away from the usual Friday questions I imagine hairdressing trainees are asked, which usually go along the lines of "So...what are you up to this weekend, then?" I catch myself asking these vapid cod-social questions you don't actually want an answer to all the time.  In fact, I asked that very question when I was having my own hair washed about five minutes later.  The 18 year-old trainee I addressed it to replied "Clubbing tomorrow night...going to Mayhem".  I replied with something along the lines of remembering when Mayhem used to be Keddies.  She wrinkled her brow and said "Keddies...was that what the club was called before it was Mayhem?"  "No - Keddies was a department store!" I replied in horror, suddenly feeling like I'd been hurtled forward in time by about eight hundred years.  I was going to add that Keddies had been a old-fashioned stuffy kind of 'Are You Being Served?' department store, but before I did, I realised there'd be no way this girl would know what 'Are You Being Served?' was and so I'd better shut up unless I wanted a nice warm blanket put round my legs when I got back to the 'styling' chair.

But I digress.  Going back to the 'telly' question I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the 16 year-old boy went silent for a good thirty seconds, looked a bit confused, then mumbled back "Err...well, actually I don't watch much telly".  The lady replied to that with "No...well I don't watch it much myself either, really" and then neither of them said anything else.  That's what you can get when you take a gamble on an 'unfamiliar' question...confusion, then silence.

Occasionally, if I'm in the mood, I'll ask a slightly 'strange' question to people I don't know.  Taxi drivers usually bear the brunt of this, especially since I saw that Peter Kay standup show in which he said there are two questions everybody asks taxi drivers.  These are "Been busy?" and "Are you working at the weekend?"  I try not to ask these questions.  But I've noticed that, like the 16 year-old trainee flummoxed by the "telly" conundrum, people are trained to hear certain questions, and they answer them as if on auto-pilot.  They seem to strangely like the fact that they don't have to think about them.  So when I got into a cab the other day and I asked the driver if he'd ever been to Uganda, I should have expected the wrinkled brow and perplexed look I got in response.  Yet "have you ever been to Uganda?" is, on the whole, a pretty easy question to answer.  

We owe it to ourselves to be constantly surprising...and surprised...in order to make life a little bit more interesting to live.  And in my opinion, the least we can do to achieve this is by asking people what their favourite cheese is, apropos of absolutely nothing, every now and again.