“So… what do you do?” Lily asked him about 15 minutes into their by-the-bar banter, which was unusually late for her to ask, as normally that would be the first or the second thing she would find out about the guy, after getting his name.
Jared put down his drink slowly, looked at her with subtle yet profoundly sarcastic smirk and answered, chuckling lightly – “Come on… you can do better than that…”
-“What do you mean?” – she asked with a genuine curiosity?
-“You can be a little more original than asking me about what I do…I am so damn tired of this question; aren’t you!?”
She wasn’t sure what to say. She is used to having all the professional guys she meets tell her all about what they do with quite a bit of enthusiasm in an obvious attempt to impress her with how educated and well off they are and overall how good of a catch they are. But this guy was different. He got in her face for asking him a seemingly innocuous question. Not being from a shy bunch, she threw him a curve ball of her own: “Does this work?”
Jared raised his eyebrow – “What are you talking about?”
-“This… does this response work for you with the ladies?” – Lily asked.
He smiled, appreciating the fact that she gave him a dose of his own medicine. “It does – on the right ones.”
-“I see. Here we go with the reverse psychology. So, you are not going to tell me what you do for a living?”
– “ Who cares? What difference does it make?”
-“I don’t know. It’s just something that people normally ask each other when they are getting to know each other. I think that where you spend the majority of your waking hours and what you do during those hours says a lot about who you are”
-“How so?” – Jared wondered.
– “Your profession and what you do at work says a lot about your personality.”
-“If that’s true, this would mean that all the engineers, or teachers, or lawyers, or doctors have a very similar personality, and I think we both know that that’s not the case.”
Lily never thought of it that way, but what Jared was saying sounded hard to disagree with. She started wondering – why on earth did she ask him what he did for a leaving in a first place? Does it really matter to her that much? It was clear from Jared’s clean-cut, well-put-together appearance, his manners, and from how articulate he was that he was neither uneducated nor unemployed. His body language made it clear that he was not struggling to make ends meet.
Lily couldn’t blame asking that question on being at a loss of words either. It has been a while since she has that problem after being in sales / marketing for quite a while now, and after being used to talking to all kinds of stiff people in the most awkward, unnatural situations, even when she really had no desire to talk to them. She started realizing that she has gotten so used to being on autopilot when talking to random guys that it didn’t even occur to her to try to be a little more original with the next guy she meets. It suddenly dawned on Lily how cliché this what-do-you-do question is.
She then conceded: “Alright, you gotta point, Mr. Original. It is kind of lame. I will withdraw my admittedly overused question. So… how about you tell me … what is it that you don’t do besides not telling girls what you do for a living?”
-“That’s what I am talking about!” Jared exclaimed with admiration while winking at her in a tolerably cheesy way. “I knew you had it in you. You just needed someone to shake you up a bit and bring it out.” He took a sip of his drink, clearly buying time to figure out a worthy response and continued “How about I tell you all about what I don’t do the next time I see you.” – He then pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and looked her in the way assuming that she knew what he wanted.
For some inexplicable reason, Lily felt hypnotized and said in a monotone zombie-like voice: “415-608-0705, text me?” He looked up and whispered: “’Text me?’ I think I can do better than that. I will call you in the next couple of days. You have been warned.”
He smiled revealing his large, white yet clearly not bleached teeth, got up and walked away slowly. Lily watching him leave while thinking that she couldn’t remember when was the last time that an encounter with a random guy at a bar stirred something in her. It certainly happened that night. Till now, she was proud of being able to tell what any guys she talked to was going to say or ask her next, but this was clearly different, as this guy was anything but predictable. Lily knew it would take a while to figure this guy out. She was left puzzled, intrigued and quite anxious to hear from Jared.
