Spent the last couple of hours in the Book People cafe. I needed a change of scenery in which to procrastinate and surf websites instead of creating great new work. Just before I left, I watched a rather pathetic chat-up attempt.
The attemptee was an oldish bloke. By which I mean in his 50s or 60s, but clearly trying to pass himself off as younger, though I saw through his trendy jeans. Not literally, that came later. He was hovering by the coffee counter and looking at a girl sitting at a table a few feet from me. The girl was probably a college student, she was chewing gum and wearing pink. (that narrows it down then). A lot of pink – pink hoodie, pink hairband, pink socks and her hoodie had the word Pink printed down the sleeve, just to avoid any confusion.
As a sidenote, I’ll just say that the colour pink is renowned as sexual bait to attract older men, so there’s no way she was totally innocent in all this.
Anyway, I watched the man approach her. He had a fatherly look in the ‘I’d like to be your dad and so much more’ kind of way. He stood next to her table and asked if he could look at her cellphone. How corny I thought, but at least he didn’t call it a cellular telephone. So pinky hands over her phone without making eye contact and then stares into her laptop channelling her ‘bugger off you pervert’ vibe. The man examines the phone, looking at it from different angles, probably imagining that it’s her in his hands, especially when he fingers the keys and flips it over. At this point, I could see that phone was pretty cool – all tiny and skinny and black – but this still didn’t merit the amount of time the man was spending with it as he struggled to come up with the words that woud convince pinky to sleep with him.
In the end, he bottled out and simply asked where she got the phone from, but I knew that he didn’t really care about her answer because he had the scent of pink blocking his eyes and enlarged nostrils. Then he gave back the phone, thanked her and walked away. A moment later he turned around and headed back, probably thinking about how pinky needed a good spanking for giving him the brush off. But at the last minute he walked behind her seat and poured himself a cup of water from the jug. He obviously didn’t want any water, just one lingering sniff of her long dark hair and a final glimpse of the pink headband. He took a sip, then threw the cup in the bin and headed towards the toilets. Actually I don’t know that’s where he went, I’m just assuming.
A few minutes later a friend joined pinky but she didn’t divulge the story of the old josser. However, they did talk about phones and her friend mentioned the Blackberry. Pinky’s response?
‘Oh my god, those look totally 1985’
Which shows how ridiculously young and deserving to only have grubby old man attention she really is. Had she been around in 1985 she’d have realised that cell phones at that time came with a battery power backpack that could also propel you eight feet off the ground at full power. Naive fool.
Damn coffee shop distractions, how am I supposed to get any work done?