“I’m counting to three. If you’re still on the porch, you get the hose. One. Two…”
This is beautiful.
I’ve never had any problems with candidate solicitors (and I didn’t have any when I was one in high school.) I’ve scared off the religious ones. The ones who really bug me are the kids pretending to sell subscriptions for college. I’ve read articles about how they work for con men. The last guy who came was unhappy about how fast I shut the door on him.
I wish more religious types would come. They’re so much fun. (evil grin smiliy here.)
I’ve never had a problem with just closing the door.
About 20 years ago I had a stranger get aggresive with me. She was the mother of one of the people who lived on the third floor of my “duplex” (the third floor was an illegal apartment - the owner got busted for it twice in the 3.5 years I lived there). Anyway, the ground floor and our second floor apartment both had separate doors on the front porch, but to get to the third floor, you had to through the back door and up the back stairs.
Woman banging wildly on my glass door in the middle of the afternoon. I come down and open, HOLDING ONTO THE DOOR to make sure I can close it in a hurry because she looks a little wild eyed. She asks to see so-and-so. I have no clue who that is. She says she lives here. I say “No, this is my apartment. I live here.” She tries to push her way past me. I shove her backwards and say in a very menacing tone of voice, “This is my apartment. No one else lives here”. She got all wild, confused and aggresive and attempted to charge me, screaming that her daughter lived here and she needed to see her.
At that, I shoved her very roughly backwards and told her that if she tried that again, I’d beat her bloody. She was assaulting me in my own doorway and trying to gain entrance to my apartment. For all I knew, she was completely insane and the person she was looking for didn’t exist. I stepped back and closed the door. As I walked up the stairs, she went back to screaming and banging on my door. I informed her that I was calling the cops. She paused, then left.
A couple of hours later, I saw her coming out of the back stairs with the kids who lived up there. She really was the girl’s mother. (Wouldn’t look at me when I saw her, looked seriously embarassed.) Guess maybe she freaked out and thought I was a bad guy in her daughter’s apartment or something, but damn, I would have put her down hard if she’d have charged me a third time.
The threat level in this case was pretty low. He was 15 or 16 and not very big, maybe 130 lbs; he also had on a full suit and a dorky haircut. I don’t remember *him *very well but I remember that haircut, our prime minister has the same one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Stephen_Harper_(Official_Photo).jpg
I have a big sign on my door that says “No Soliciting.” My first question to someone knocking on my door and trying to sell me something (goods, religion, or politics) is, “Did you see the sign?” and I just get owlier from there. I’ve never had a problem with someone getting aggressive with me.
“No thanks, not interested” followed by closing the door usually works. I have a screen door that I don’t open, so that negates the foot-in-the-door trick.
I’ve had problems in the past coming home to political signs in my front yard. It’s no one’s business who I am voting for. The last local cycle I came home one evening to find mulitple sign in my yard for various candidates. Called the headquarters of one to find out WTF? and they didn’t know what happened. At work the following day I was bitching to a co-worker about it - turned out another co-worker did it. Figured because I was union I would support the candidates the union promoted, so when the various hamsters were at her house (a block down from mine) she fricking told them that I wouldn’t mind signs either.
Suffice it to say she heard about it, her supervisor heard about it, and the union people heard about it.
“Boot to the head, nah, nah”. 