I went to a hot dog stand on the corner. The proprietor was busy, so I started digging in one of the ice chests for a Diet Coke. I didn’t see one right away, and the guy was no longer talking to someone else so I asked if he knew whether he had any.
“One moment!” he said, in a thick Russian accent.
I continued rummaging. He ducked out of the stand and came around just as I found a bottle.
Me: Oh, sorry, I found one.
Him: You don’t want that one. No.
Me: I… don’t?
Him: No. You want THE BIG ONE.
(He rummages through a different ice chest and pulls out a 1 liter bottle.)
Me: Ooh.
Him: Yes.
Me: Do I look that desperate for caffeine?
Him: Some people, they come up and you can look at them and tell, “This is VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS.”
Me: How much for THE BIG ONE?
Him: For you? Same charge.
Thus I found out that I have the look of someone VERY SERIOUS about caffeine and that I should never play poker against this guy. He read me like a very short book.
Someone once came up to me to ask if we had any books about motorbikes. Apparently I look like I’m into motorbikes. Also, I am into motorbikes and my licence is only valid for such.
Someone walked up to me in the street and started talking about her autistic son. Wanted to know if I’d “been diagnosed with anything”. Apparently I look autistic. Whether I am, all I can say is that any spectrum I’m on involves staying away from doctors.
The last speeding ticket I got, the cop started laughing while looking at my drivers license. He explained that I looked just like my picture, which is apparently a rarity.
I’ve always gone out of my way to look disheveled and angry when I get my DL pic taken. This was the first time anyone had noticed.
One time (in a previous job in the 1990s), I was working the front desk, and one of the clients asked me if I had Tourette syndrome. Just out of the blue! To my knowledge, I hadn’t screamed out any profanity or obscenities, or displayed any odd facial tics, so I simply replied “Not I don’t think so.” I was kind of half-expecting him to say that he had it, and was hoping to find a similarly-afflicted soul to commiserate with. But he just sat back down without another word. Funny!
I think my hot dog stand guy finally retired. Frequently bought two chili half somkes from him on my way home from work. Nowadays I’m pretty much only in that neighborhood when going to my doctor’s office and haven’t seen his cart lately.
I’m so stealing that. “He read me like a very short book.”
A Google search yielded that you invented that very sentence. The expression sounded so good, so like it should have been used many times before. And yet, Google says that very sentence has only been used in your OP.
