Is it a terrible character flaw to find overly-nice people really bloody irritating?
We used to have this sandwich man come round at work. He was Asian, over 50 (probably), slightly cowed and he mumbled, but was very polite and always thanked you profusely for your purchase and told you to have a nice day/weekend. He was only being friendly, but I thought he was the most pathetic of creatures and his subservience really used to get on my nerves to the point where I thought I might be rude to him if he carried on the way he was going. Luckily he was replaced by someone else, who rings a bell on arrival. Guess where I'm planning to shove that in the not too distant future.
There's a newsagent round the corner from my house where I started going of a morning and which eventually reached the how are you stage. So instead of just popping in, buying what I wanted then leaving, it became that a stop and chat was expected. I stopped going.
The woman in the dry cleaners who always calls me by the wrong name and now it's too late to correct her is the only person I can bear to chat to, local small business-wise. But she's not overly nice, and doesn't want to engage me in a long chat so perhaps that's why. Though she did once dye our bathmats for us at no extra cost.
Is it shyness on my part? Or rudeness? Or just that I want to be able to go about my business without being showered with niceties that are not sincere? Someone I know is always so nice and sympathetic about everything but somehow it just doesn't ring true and I think she uses it to get what she wants in life. I'm not fooled and neither are a lot of other people. Or am I being too harsh? Don't even start me on unnaturally perky people. They're clearing drowning in a sea of despair.
Anyhoo, because it's Friday and a traditional music day, and because my current musical obsession is the period 1961-63, here's Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen with the evocative Midnight In Moscow. It's trad, dad!
