Tactics Tuesdays: Fresh Stories to Tell to Girls

You should always have a few fresh, recent stories to tell about your life.

These don't have to be particularly amazing stories. But they should be a little interesting, they should be recent, and they should display some interesting trait about you.

For instance, do you ever get people run up to you with strange requests? Four days ago I was at a Starbucks, eating a yogurt cup and reading my Kindle. They have this low-fat yogurt at Starbucks that is horrible. I don't know who wants yogurt with the fat out. But if you get the mixed berry yogurt, you can scoop up some berry and granola with the yogurt so it isn't too awful.

Well, I'm sitting there at this table by the window by myself, and I notice some girl hovering nearby. She looks like she's looking out the window, but I think she wants something.

Anyway, I go back to my book and my slightly awful low-fat yogurt.

The girl suddenly appears again, right at my table, and interrupts my reading. She says excuse me, do you have WhatsApp on your phone?

I look at her. She's pretty. But her face is glistening like she's been running a marathon or has a gland problem or something. And she looks all serious and distracted.

I can't tell if she's trying to meet someone and lost her phone, if she's using this as an excuse to meet me, or if she wants to steal my phone.

"I need to log into my WhatsApp account to check my messages," she tells me.

"Oh, sorry," I say. "I don't have WhatsApp."

But she doesn't leave. She just stands there, with her glistening face and her serious, distracted look.

"Oh," she says. "Because I thought everyone has WhatsApp. I just need to log into my account."

I don't know if she didn't hear me or what. She's not even really looking at me now, just glancing around as if scanning for predators. I do a quick mental calculus of "Do I want to go out of my way to help this random sweaty distracted chick? Do I want to tell her she can download WhatsApp to my phone, then sit there and watch her like a hawk while she uses it to make sure she doesn't make a break to run out of Starbucks with it?"

Instead I just tell her "Sorry, I don't have it."

She stands there for another moment, still looking sweaty and distracted. Finally she says "Okay, thanks" and walks off.

I notice her 15 minutes later over at some long table in the Starbucks, texting on a phone, still looking sweaty and serious but now laser-focused on whatever she's texting. So I guess she found someone to lend her a phone.

I dunno, what would you do in that scenario? I might've been more inclined to lend her my phone if she'd used a napkin first and wiped all that sweat off.