Let invite myself to ski with you

Earlier this month, my wife and I were skiing and as we were riding the chairlift, a gentleman started a conversation.

After showing off his professional experience, telling us about his impressive possessions and inquiring about who we were - which we did, stopping short of giving him our Social Security numbers – the man decided, quite unilaterally to ski with us.

My wife doesn’t ski often with me and we treat each of her ski outings as special, and not necessarily “open to the public”… So after a first run during which the intruder was intermingling his skiing into ours, my wife suggested that I took him on a more challenging run while she’d wait for us at the bottom after redoing the same easier run.

He accepted and I proceeded to take him into a steep bowl, where of course I left the dude in the dust. A nice host, I waited for him twice so he could catch up with me, and the guy stuck with us for another two runs.

Tired of being shadowed, we pretended that we’d quit skiing for the day to get rid of the ski-parasite. That subterfuge didn’t quite work, because the intruder managed to ski with us all the way down to the parking lot.

Next time, we promised ourselves to be more direct...