[Sca-cooks] shopping shyness?

[Phlip]

Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...

> Ok, so I was taught to shop by my Grandfather (one of the great grocery >
shoppers of all time), my mom, and Florence-my-ex's-Jewish-mother, so
> maybe my shopping habits are a bit odd. But I've never had any problem
> or concern about conversing with people about what I'm buying all this
> food for. After all, if you walk out of the Food4Less with 80 loaves of
> bread, the little old men *will* ask if you are having a hoagie sale. So
> you explain you are doing lunch for 800, and it all goes well. When we
> were paying for the whole roast pig for the feast last weekend, and the
> butcher asked whether we were going to have a luau, of coruse I said,
> Actually we're having a medieval dinner, it's for a club... and we
> conversed happily.
>
> But I found out that some people are uncomfortable sharing this kind of
> information about our club. Is it just a personal difference (after all,
> I was a cute  spoilt kid and happily talked to anyone when I was little
> too...) or is it a regional SCA thing?
>
> -- 
> -- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa,

I think it might just be a personality thing. I learned to chit chat with
anybody about anything many years ago, when I was an insurance agent- you
gotta talk to folks when you're in sales, although listening is the most
important part- and I've found that you can strike up a conversation with
almost anybody, if you smile and are pleasant. Hadda laugh when I was
visiting Vencenzo, getting my computer worked on a while back, in northern
New Jersey. Someone came on some List or another, griping about how
unfriendly people were in that area, probably because of the influence of
NYC, and I told them that while I was there, I had had a number of pleasant
bits of chit chat with all sorts of people, from shopkeepers, to random
folks encountered in the parking lot- told her I figured it was likely more
her own attitude, than the unfriendlimess of people in the area.

And, being friendly pays off. When I was looking for geese for my feast, I
asked the store manager at one store, explaining what I was doing, he
introduced me to the meat manager, and we discussed re enactments in
general, discovered one of them was very interested in Revolutionary
Reenactment, didn't find any geese, but discovered they had a special on
salmon going, and, since I was buying in a pretty fair quantity, gave me a
price break, and went back to the back and got me some that had been kept
colder, so it was the freshest they had.

Just talking to people pays off. At the Flea Market I haunt on Sundays, I've
made some friends, and one brought me an entire box, over 150 yards, of
wonderful trim for $10 a couple weeks later, another _gave_ me a special
hammer that I'd been trying to find for a couple years, and a third just
gave me 4 little metal cordial glasses she thought I could use in my
recreation.

Being friendly pays off. Just remember that folks out in the wide world are
just as shy as you are, and really enjoy a friendly face breaking up their
day a bit.


Saint Phlip,
CoD

"When in doubt, heat it up and hit it with a hammer."
 Blacksmith's credo.

 If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably not a
cat.

Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....



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