To tell you about this time at Starbucks

I have amazing friends. I have been so blessed to have wonderful people come into my life that share my faith and my interests. One of those interests being Scrabble. I really enjoy Scrabble, I play to win primarily, and the fun is a byproduct of those times.

We try to get together every so often to play Scrabble. Normally, one of us hosts at our homes, but right now we are all in a transitional phase (mine being a complete upheaval of everything with renovations) so I decided that we should meet at Starbucks.

I brought my Super Scrabble board (it is huge and has quadruple letter scores, we play with nine tiles instead of seven in order to speed up the game since there are double the amount of letters), and someone brought their lazy suzan spinner, we grabbed lattes and sat down by the fire.

It's like a scene from a sitcom, isn't it? Don't you just want to be our friends?

We were completely absorbed in our game and our conversation when a woman leaned in to ask if we were 'really playing Scrabble?' to which we answered, 'of course'. She went on talking about how her mom would be over the moon to hear about a group of women meeting at a Starbucks to play Scrabble.  We were enthusiastically eating up everything that she was saying, glad to be seen as quirky and fun instead of complete geeks that play Scrabble at Starbucks.

And then it happened. 

The woman transitioned into her motive. She asked if we heard what they were talking about. And like baby fish newly spawned, we all took the bait. "No" we said with wide eyes and big smiles. Jewelry. She was trying to sell us jewelry. Or better yet, she was trying to convince us to be peddlers of her product. She even asked us who organized our get together and made us make a promise that we would 'email her so we could invite her mother out to our get togethers'. Yeah right, lady. 

I felt so cheap. What I thought was honest enthusiasm was a complete sales pitch. I thought she was genuine and excited, but she was simply showing her entourage how to effectively weasel your way in, make a connection, and scatter your information around a group of people.

She did it so skillfully. I'm not sure if it was that she was so good at having us eat out of her hand, or if it was the whole pretence and staged conversation. I felt like a pigeon. But she was good. And I'm sure it would be a difficult job to churn up your own business, and I have to hand it to her, it takes a lot of courage and charisma in order to have people eating out of your hand. 

But we thought she thought we were cool. We aren't, we play Scrabble together, in public. And I love that about my friends.

That's all.