On my run today I passed two men standing in the street wearing suits. One of them was holding a clipboard. They didn't seem to be doing anything, just standing still between two houses. I would have guessed they were doing some kind of door to door survey, but then they didn't seem to be going door to door. Just standing. In the street.
I don't think I knew them, but you know, I was running so fast it is hard to make out faces.
As I went by one of them said, "Are you all right?"
Not out of concern, you understand. I am sure I looked a picture of health and fitness. It was a friendly enquiry into whether I was feeling OK today.
I responded with a slightly confused "Yes". I was now several paces down the street. I didn't look back to see if I knew them or why they had been interested in how I was feeling.
Now I think about it I wonder if that was just their job. Perhaps they were being paid by someone to stand in a fairly quiet road in Hammersmith and enquire about the health of passersby. I imagine that had I turned round I would have seen one of the men ticking a box on clipboard - Yes. Doubtless, all possible answers were catered for. At the end of the day the two besuited men could go back to their mysterious boss and inform him that 65% of passersby in Hammersmith today were "all right", 20% were feeling a bit under the weather and 15% told us to "fuck and/or piss off". Their boss could then use that information to increase the efficiency of whichever business he was in. Don't ask me what that was. But he's clearly pretty successful if he can afford to pay two smart men to do this strange job, which could easily be done by one of them (rather than having one to ask and one to write down the answer, these two jobs could be combined into a joint asking/writing role) or in fact by some underpaid woman in India sitting in a call centre (if her phone was connected to a loudspeaker which was placed in this obscure west London street - though such a disembodied voice might surprise passersby and result in a high per centage of answer f "No, I was, but now I am a bit frightened.")
I hope both blokes manage to keep their jobs though. They were very good at both asking and (I imagine) writing and I think to combine the two posts would actually decrease their effectiveness.
