identity crisis

“What do you do for a living?”   

Not exactly a trick question.  Still, I stood there speechless.  The clerk at the Verizon store looked up from his computer screen and stared at me with a puzzled expression.  When he asked me the question, he probably didn’t even really care about the answer.  He was just trying to be friendly while I waited for him to activate my new phone.   But since there was a delay in my response, now he was curious.

“I…uh…have a couple of properties I look after.”   

He kept staring at me, his brow furrowed.   I stammered around some more.   

“I mean, I have some rental properties that I take care of.”

“Okay,” he said, looking back at his computer screen and giving a little shrug, as if to say, “Was it really that hard of a question?”