Thursday, September 14, 2006

What are you lookin' at?

So, coming back from Seattle the other day, I decided to have a little fun with people and do a bit of an experiment. I got this green shirt (bright Kelly Green) that says on the front – “STOP LOOKING AT MY SHIRT”. hahahahaha – It’s an awesome shirt! Size L, not XL, btw…hehehe - Anyway, I wore this shirt on my way back home knowing I would be wearing it in Seattle, SEATAC and Atlanta. I think you can tell a lot about people when you can notice their reaction to something like that. And, man oh man…did I get lots of reaction. Most people who I watched read it (I need to show a pic of it…it really does attract attention so you can see people looking at it before they actually look at your face…it’s quite humorous), would be looking down at it and then look up to see who would wear such a shirt and notice me looking at them already (the knew I was watching them read my shirt) and they would quickly turn their head. It’s a wonder none of them got whiplash. A couple of people who saw it laughed out loud, which was really what I was going for, and oddly enough, the only ones who laughed out loud were older women – maybe 50ish – and they also talked to me telling me how much they loved the shirt! So, after this, I decided to mix it up a bit and see if I could control the responses by the way I looked at people. None of this was in any way scientific, but boy did I have fun with it! Some people I did not smile at, at all. I just stared them down when they looked at me. These people, all of them I did that to, turned and looked away really fast. Others, I smiled at when they looked at me and most of them smiled back…and all of them looked at my shirt a 2nd time (which the ones I stared at did not). Then I decided to say “hey/hi” when others looked at my shirt. I don’t remember exact numbers, but it was less than half that said hey back. I just thought this was really neat. Then I decided to say “so, you like my shirt?” to people and smiled while saying it. Keep in mind, I wore this all morning (at Starbucks, Border’s, the airport for 2 hours and getting on the plane – all of this before ATL) and had plenty of time to come up with things to do. Most of these people (easily more than half, but not all) would smile back and say, “yeah”, or “it’s cute (the women said that)”, etc. No one said “no”. I thought this was pretty funny, because I’m sure at least one person I asked didn’t like it but lied to my face. Anyway, not super therapeutic, but it was a fun social experiment that I enjoyed. I’m gonna have to wear that shirt more often.

2 comments:

Tonya said...

haha, that's funny

lisa said...

Don't encourage him ;)