As a college student, I'm drawn to the semiannual poster sale held in the Campus Center lobby like a moth to a flame and last fall was no exception. I searched through piles of posters for the perfect, glossy emblem of my individuality. Sadly, nothing spoke to my own tastes, but I did find a great gift for a friend--a hyper-cute caricature of Alex from the film A Clockwork Orange (...I have strange friends). As always, I was broke, but I had heard that one could earn a poster from the vendors by passing out fliers for them. The rumor was true and I stepped outside with a handful of fliers to disseminate to my fellow students.
Once outside, I realized that approaching people as they walked up to the building and pushing a piece of paper into their hands did not appeal to me--confrontation makes me nervous. After quickly running through a few tactics, I decided to sit cross-legged in the middle of the 20ft. wide walkway leading to the building's entrance, with a flier extended upward in each hand (I was told later that I looked like some odd religious figure). I had a hypothesis that by simply sitting in an area where it's unexpected for a person to be sitting and offering an object to be taken, I would either 1. be given an extremely wide berth and avoided at all costs or 2. make approachers curious enough about my behavior to take the paper I was offering. When traffic was low, the former happened more frequently than the latter, but both occurred. When traffic was high, some passersby lost the option bow their paths out around me and many more people took the fliers (some people even thanked me when they took it).
It was pretty fun to people watch. And after only an hour and some change of sitting in the sun, I got my poster and skipped off.