Dialogue Straight Out Of A Gosengfiao Script

Seated next to me in a cybercafé is an ultra-aggressive salesman from a Pyramid/Networking company involved in indeterminate products slash foreign exchange. He was explaining how the schemes work to a posse of loud women who seemed to be new recruits, or as I fondly call them, suckers.

I tried to zone out their networking twaddle but it was hard to ignore one of the women’s three-hued garish eye shadow/s, in shades that would make the pantone swatch book/the rainbow bright characters/the teletubbies/Elton John/Bob Mackie/Liberace’s closet look neutral.

“Ikaw, SIR!” he suddenly turned to me (which made me jump a little) with the mad enthusiasm not seen outside Oprah/Wheel Of Fortune/Televised Evanglism. “Baka gusto ninyo sumideline!” (How about you, sir?! Would you be interested to make a quick buck?”)

Even a frozen Rice-A-Roni would have a better judgment not to ever attempt declining a networking salesman’s behest. They thrive on rejection. As a sales mantra would have it: “Selling begins when the client says no!”

Or the way I would decode it: “If they decline, the fools, bring out the Holy Book and begin quoting from the Book of Revelations until they are wracked with guilt and terror that their brains melt into a gooey muck and start oozing out of their nostrils!”

Idiot that I am, in my scatterbrained state, politely but foolishly uttered a tepid “No, thank you.”

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

Sensing a golden chance to dazzle his lady friends of his convincing genius, and, the potential of an economic reward of converting me into a slavering cash cow/downline he latched on my disinterest/rejection like fungal infection that refuses to go away.

“Ayaw mo yumaman?!” (Don’t you want to be rich?!) he exclaimed in a mix of shock, awe and disbelief.

Look, I may be a bonafide zit online but in real life I try to be polite and respectful of people trying to have a crack at a living. So I half-smiled and shook my head.

Naturally this incensed the resolve of the salesman, who by now is fully enraptured in an evangelical mission to convert my disbelieving refusal and embrace the untold wealth awaiting me in the grand altar of pyramid scams, errr schemes.

“Bakit?!” (Why?!)

Now I was struggling to phrase a difficult decision to refuse an equally-pesky client request and the salesman's hell-bent in not giving me a slice of quiet or a semblance of personal space.

“I am very busy, I have no time.” I said without tearing away my focus on my typing.

“Ayaw mo kumita ng MORE THAN TWENTY THOUSAND a month?!” (Are you refusing potential 20K earning in a month?” His eyes flashed like the Mephistopheles in Faustus.

Wickedness crept into my warped mind.

I stopped typing, faced him, stared, smiled with the menacing glee of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and hissed:

“I earn more than that per hour!”

A lie, obviously. But peace was restored between us.