It's Saturday night, I'm on a beach trip with my bros. We'd been at the bar about five minutes when a beautiful blonde walks over and introduces herself to myself and one of my friends. We make small talk for a few minutes, when an interval of silence begins between topics. Not wanting it to creep into the "awkward silence" domain, I ask, "So, have you been working hard?". She furrows her brow and says "I'm... I'm sorry?", to which I reply, "Oh, you know, my friends and I all worked our asses off this week so we could go out and party down here for the weekend.". So now she's got her lips pursed, one eyebrow raised, and she's like, "Uh, no, actually, I'm on island time. And that means that I can do whatever I want, whenever I wanna do it." (Edit: yes, we are on an island). "Cool," I say, and proceed to say something stupid about how I'm finally on island time, and how nice it is. The conversation is clearly over, I've really put her off. She walks off, and we all go back to bro night. About an hour later she leaves the bar with someone else. One of my friends who was outside smoking a cig and missed the whole thing thinks that I accused her of prostitution with the "Have you been working hard" question. Truthfully, I was just trying to make small talk, but I think I may have stumbled on a very interesting question to ask women at bars. I may need to find a way to make it slightly less bullish. Thoughts?
Can always try and reverse the question - "So, are you on vacation?" followed up by "From what?". Whenever I'm trying to make conversation with anyone, some of my go-to's are "What've you been up to?" and "So what brings you here?" - vague, informal, open-ended questions that are great for starters. It's such an strange aspect of human culture that we can misunderstand each other so weirdly at times...
Those are both pretty safe. And yeah, the spectrum of people's communication protocols is deep and wide, even in a dive bar outside of city limits. I didn't communicate properly, I went for a swiss army triplet when she ordered a paraflam cheese. But on the flip side, I'm not into one night stands, and I'd never date someone with no job or not in school. It was just interesting to accidentally stumble across a sort of AFK filter of that criteria for the face-to-face "scene". Guess I hadn't really thought about it before it happened. All of this is monumentally eclipsed by the fact that I'm already in love with someone, and it's monogamous.