Smoots in the City

The Smoot clan headed into Pittsburgh last night to attend the annual Home and Garden Show at the Convention Center. As a result, I spent much of the evening attempting to avoid eye contact with vendors, while keeping my ears pealed (or is it "peeled?" Who knows) for those wonderful words: "Free Samples!"

It's rare that I'll willingly put myself into a situation where I know that people are going to be attempting to sell me stuff. There are few things in life that I find more annoying than sales pitches of any shape or form, let alone when salespeople materialize out of thin air in front of me.

Thankfully the sales leeches weren't terribly bad at the home show. I may have become somewhat desensitized by them after our recent Christmas cruise to Mexico, though. In the port community of Majahual, it was almost necessary to fend them off in slow motion, like a scene from The Matrix.

Anyway, I managed to escape most of the sales pitches merely by avoiding eye contact last night, although I was alert and ready to pretend that I was deaf, or merely oblivious, or having a seizure, or whatever was going to be necessary to express my non-interest. I did wind up in an extremely one-sided conversation where I learned everything there is to know about a certain brand of candles, and of course we now have a new candle in the house as a memento.

Mrs. Smoot, who is a much better person than I am, has a much higher tolerance for sales goons. At the very least, she's polite to them and is capable of acknowledging their existence. And oftentimes she's willing to stand there and listen to a sales pitch while I pretend to be invisible/deaf/oblivious/in the midst of a seizure.

The free samples got me by, though. We barely needed to eat dinner after indulging on little cubes of meats and little pretzels with various goo on them. We also greatly enjoyed many free samples of potato chips, including a hot dog flavored chip, which was alarmingly good.