Hey Self-Absorbed Asshole, Could You Possibly Have One Lousy Minute To Spare For The Children?

After a summer of being spurned daily by people who, frankly, don’t have the time to consider the environment, “dialoguers” try a different tactic — negging:

They spot you as you’re walking near Union Square on your lunch hour. Two impossibly fresh-faced, college-age canvassers with clipboards station themselves at either end of the block. They’re facing each other, so that no pedestrian heading in either direction can escape the trap they’ve set on this sunny summer afternoon.

As you approach them, you do what you can to pretend not to notice. You adjust the headphones of your MP3 player as a way of advertising that you can’t hear anything lower than the sound of an airplane engine. Or you pull the celebrity trick — holding a cell phone up to one ear, even though you’re not really on a call. And whatever you do, you don’t make eye contact.

But there’s no way you’re escaping the pitch.

“Got a minute for the environment?”

Or . . .

“Got a minute for gay rights?”

Or . . .

“Got a minute for the ACLU?”

And despite your evasions, you just can’t keep going, because the canvasser — who is younger and lither than you — has pounced into your path with the quickness of a jungle cat and is staring at you with an expectant, disarming smile.

. . .

It’s noon, it’s over 90 degrees, and Garth Mramor, late of Buffalo and Colorado University, overtakes a woman before she has time to run away. With sweat dripping down his ruddy face, he stares into her eyes and delivers his pitch at breakneck speed, knowing that he has only seconds to get it all out.

“Hi-my-name-is-Garth-and-I’m-from-Children-International-and-we’re-trying-to-help-children-in-poverty. Children-in-abject-poverty. There-are-kids-dying-every-day- because-they-don’t-have-something-as-silly-as-food-and-water. I-mean-even-a-bum-in-New-York-can-have-two-meals-a-day!”

Despite the fact that his breathless spiel is all monologue, Garth’s job title is “dialoguer.” It’s a term coined by an Austrian company known as the Dialogue Group, which helped to develop this brand of street confrontation and brought it to U.S. cities a few years ago with a subsidiary called Dialogue Direct.

Garth pauses to catch his breath and then whips out a laminated picture of his own sponsored child, an innocent-looking boy sitting in a hut thatched with palm fronds. The location, he says, is the Dominican Republic. He checks to see whether he still has the attention of the woman in front of him. He does, but then realizes he’s talking to a reporter.

“Children are dying and you’re wasting my time!” he says, scowling. Mramor drops the laminated photograph back into his duffel bag. He doesn’t apologize for seeming rude. “Being nice doesn’t work,” says the irritated college student. “I signed up two people today by being an asshole, and I’ll continue to do that. Have a nice day.”