I hate boredom. No, really! JobLandTM WAS boredom. Tedium. Repetition. There were very few ways to alleviate this problem, other than talking to coworkers, occasionally boring in themselves. So I'd tell stories and when I ran out of actual things to say, truth would occasionally be forsaken.
So I'd end up talking about going to school, or whatever. Occasionally politics, though many there wouldn't know much about current events and end up… puzzled. Occasionally someone would ask what I studied at University. BSc. in Biological Sciences and an Extended Minor in Psychology. Blah Blah blah.
Things were proceeding in this sort of predictable manner during the course one such conversation so it was aborted. The subject then turned to our jobs at JobLandTM. I said, as though I were confiding in this individual, that I wasn't actually an employee. I pointed out that I was here doing research for a Masters degree, and I had this arranged with my supervisors. Shit, I was making up this crap as I went along so I start to talk about how my research deals with how one can manipulate people's behaviour just by putting things into ordinary conversations that you have with them. Make them do things, etc – and the things you put into the sentences aren't ones that people would immediately notice and wouldn't have anything to do with the behaviour that you wanted them to engage in. Still, you could manipulate people without them knowing. This gathered some attention.
I was struggling because even though I had a rapt audience I didn't know where I was going with this. This is just the kind of thing that can disintegrate quickly because you are lying through your teeth and don't have the prior thought organized to answer questions/prove your claims. He asked a few more easy to answer questions when the opportunity arose to really seize the moment and turn it into something memorable.
He knocked over his cup of water all over me. A moment of beauty. No, really.
As I pushed my chair away from the table to partially escape the deluge, I said: “Dammit (insert name here)! You weren't supposed to do that until after I left!”
He immediately got up from the table, looking shocked, fled, and I was never able to coax him to have another conversation with me ever again.