The closing shift on a Sunday night in a liquor store is almost painfully slow compared to the hustle and/or bustle of a Friday night. The shelves stay stocked, the bottles in the stacker boxes gather dust, and I spend more time than necessary staring at my fingernails and wondering why my polish never stays on for longer than a day before it chips horribly.
Sunday nights are, for the most part, boring. When I get bored, I get a little weird. Weirder than normal, actually. On my Friday night shift, someone watching the security tapes will undoubtedly be treated to footage of me dancing like an idiot to whatever song is playing on the radio, bouncing up and down as I get excited about something stupid, and making a general fool of myself. Friday nights are fun and I feed off the energy of my customers. Sunday nights, the footage of me is rather subdued, as I check my phone for text messages in the long gaps between shoppers. My brain starts meandering, I start daydreaming, and before I know it, I've let my brain do whatever it wants.
Which is where it gets interesting.
As a veteran of the stage, I've spent over half my young life learning to adapt my own physical traits and my voice to create a character that is distinctly not me. It's a skill and an art form, certainly, but these days, my acting abilities are used fucking with my customers.
I didn't intend to do it, I really didn't. But a man came in about halfway through my shift and purchased a 6-pack of Guiness. For those of you who aren't history geeks like myself, Guiness had a birthday April 25th, 250 years old. The man buying his Guiness shares that birthday, only not so old. We chatted a bit, and before he had finished four sentences I had picked up his beautiful Irish brogue. I can't help myself. If I hear an accent, I will pick it up almost instantly, and it takes me forever to get rid of it. When I returned from Holland after a week, it took me almost a month before the Dutch mannerisms and slang dissolved from my vocabulary. So, since I was bored, I made no effort to rid myself of the Irish accent. I laid it on thick for the rest of the evening, just to see how people would react to it. The results are in, and this is what I've discovered:
-The sleazier guys wont hit on me if I sound foreign. My standard fare of foisting off date offers or phone number requests diminished instantly as soon as I sounded snooty and European.
-People don't notice that you're not answering their questions directly when you speak with an accent. I was frequently asked "Where are you from? What accent is that?" To which I would reply, "It's Irish." Which is true. It's an Irish accent. It's just not real.
-My coworkers are endlessly amused by me.
-It's hard to sing along with the song on the radio when you're faking an accent.
-I'm apparently good at faking accents because I have a diverse vocabulary that already includes some European slang.
I'm sure there's more things that are interesting about faking an accent at work, but those are the really crucial ones. Sometimes, when nothing blog-worthy happens in my Spenard Paradise, I have to make my own fun.
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