This bugs me too. I don't like it when someone tries to pressure me into doing something. Another example is the cashier's attempt to wring a charitable donation out of me as he/she rings up my purchases. This seems to happen at every supermarket and drug store lately. "Would you like to donate one dollar to [insert charity name]?" And if I choose not to give, suddenly I'm Ebenezer Scrooge.
OHHHHhhhh, good one. Yes, that is EXTREME pissing-off material. You know what I said the last time that happened around Christmastime? I pointed to the receipt and said, "can't afford any more at THESE prices." Got the special just-bit-into-a-lemon look for that one.
I give, of course, to some extent; sometimes planned, sometimes just on a whim. You probably do the same. But it pisses me off mightily when these places take advantage of you being, essentially, a captive audience, and that tactic is guaranteed to ensure that I DON'T give a thing in that particular circumstance.
(I made an exception to this rule,
once, for the VFW, outside a Publix in Florida. I donate something to the VFW every year anyway, so a little bit more didn't bug me, and it's the VFW, after all.)
Here’s one that’s similar; I work in Chelsea in Manhattan. Sometimes, people (usually young) stake out the sidewalk territory outside our building to raise money for one of their causes—and quite often, by the way, they’re “causes†I’d just as soon TAKE money from and sure as hell wouldn’t give a cent to—gay this, transgender that, anti-Tea Party, pro-Muzzie/anti-all-the-rest-of-us crap at the height of the furor over that foul GZ mosque project. Here’s the thing: they’re trained to walk up to you with a smile and their hands out for a handshake, and with a kind of "knowing" eye contact, to take advantage of the natural response of a decent person who’s thinking “hey, I must know this person from somewhere, they want to shake my hand, now where did I know them from?†They ask you how you are, and you ask the same in return, of course, still thinking, "now where do I know him/her from?"THEN they launch into their damn pitch after they’ve shaken your hand. THEN you realize that, hey, you don’t know this person and you never did (because, after all, we do meet people and, after long periods of no contact, forget them sometimes). Absolutely infuriates me, and is also guaranteed to get nothing from me. And more than a few of the importunate creeps who employ this slimy, slimy tactic have then looked and ME with distaste and anger after I say “Oh, we don’t know each other, no, no..†and walk away. The gall. It’s a rotten thing to take advantage of both a person’s natural forgetfulness and also natural civility.
