Talking To Strangers

One of my grandmother’s superpowers was her ability to make and keep friends. She went to an annual lunch with her friends from grade school well into her nineties, and she began an enduring friendship later in life that started with a shared eye-roll with a stranger in a restaurant when the server did something shady with a breakfast order. I wasn’t there to know exactly what transpired, but I can imagine based on my own experience of a hotel breakfast I’d had with her. As our waiter came through the swinging door from the kitchen, my soft-boiled egg rolled out of the egg cup and onto the floor. He did an immediate u-turn and re-entered the kitchen with the closing swing of the door while kicking the egg back into the kitchen. He immediately came back out the door with the egg back in the cup. I always thought the five-second rule was for residential applications only but apparently not. If the look my grandmother gave me was anything like the one she gave the stranger, I know why the stranger wanted to be her friend. We were laughing hysterically. And yes, because I was removing the shell anyway, I ate the floor egg.

It was a family joke that my grandmother was likely to run into someone she knew no matter where we went, but even with that knowledge, I was still impressed when she and I attended a play in London and she waved to someone across the theater. It was her doctor, who came over and warmly said hello. I had wrongly assumed her circle was limited to the continental United States.

I’m sure it was with this warm and friendly approach to life that my vacationing grandparents started chatting with a woman they didn’t know who was sitting next to them on a beach in Florida. It didn’t take long for them to discover they were all from a similar area of Pennsylvania, which led to them drilling down for further details. It turned out that this woman had worked at a hotel my grandparents were familiar with. Small world! How exactly the conversation turned to the strangest thing that this woman had ever seen at the hotel I don’t know, but she shared that many years previously, she had discovered a Christmas tree left behind in a bathtub, and not during the holidays.
That’s slightly amusing, but what makes this story worthy is - and I know the odds of this happening are so astronomically small that it almost defies belief - my grandparents were the ones who put that tree in the tub. My parents had spent their wedding night at that hotel, and my grandparents, who were Christmas tree farmers, thought it would be funny to surprise the young couple with a little taste of home. My grandparents had let hotel management know what they were up to, I’m sure in part to make sure it was OK, and in part to get help sneaking into the room, but I guess no one warned housekeeping about it. I wish I knew if my grandparents confessed to their new beach acquaintance, or if they had to avoid her for the rest of their vacation.

I can only imagine how it would feel to have something like that circle back on you, but I still advocate for asking people about their most unusual workplace moment.

I once noticed more than a little paint on the wall behind a paint store’s big shaker mixing machine. It looked like there had been what I would call “an incident” so I asked about it. I was disappointed with the answer of merely an unsecured lid, so I asked the employee to tell me the worst paint accident he’d ever seen there. He didn’t even have to think about it and immediately launched into a fascinating saga of an out-of-control forklift driving into a bank of shelving in the back room, which knocked the shelves over and set loose a flood of paint. One employee just wordless left afterwards and they were wondering if he’d perhaps quit, but it turned out he was on a mission. He’d remembered hearing that kitty litter should be used on paint spills, so he drove to a nearby store, bought massive quantities of it, and proceeded to dump it all over the spill. That’s when he learned you’re supposed to pour kitty litter around a spill to keep it from spreading further, not dump it into the paint, and he’d made what was already a massive cleanup much worse.

Custom color can take a while to mix but my paint was ready and paid for and this story was still going strong. I didn’t move from my spot. I was transfixed, and of course, hoping to catch a glimpse of the storeroom floor.

Another time, I was getting my hair cut (sidebar: what exactly is barbicide and what can it do to Barbs?) and midway through, because of his process, my hair looked wild. I commented on how crazy I looked and hoped no one I knew would see me. I asked if he’d ever had to stop at an awkward stage like this. He proceeded to tell me about a time he’d been hired to work out of a salon in a retirement community. He had started a hair coloring treatment for one woman, and while she waited for dye to set, he was cutting another woman’s hair. That’s when the fire broke out in the facility. The woman getting her hair cut looked like I did and refused to leave until he worked a little longer to make her look presentable. She didn’t want her friends to see her like that, and her position was only made worse when she saw a news crew show up with cameras. No way was she going to be filmed looking like that to the population at large. She wouldn’t budge. For a fire. The woman getting the hair coloring had the opposite reaction and high-tailed it out of there. Unfortunately, that was also a problem. Because of the dye in her hair, she was at risk of chemical burns on her scalp if he didn’t find her and rinse the dye out. He had to search high and low for her. He doesn’t work at the retirement facility anymore.

The moral of the story: unless you have a dark and sordid past like my grandparents, don’t be afraid to ask a random question or two. You never know what you’ll hear.