Actually, she was probably just new on the job, and still buying into those customer service training films, but for the purposes of ego inflation I'm going to say she was flirting.

If she had been flirting, it was a significant event -- women rarely flirt with me now that I'm married. Clearly that whole thing about chicks digging married guys is just some sort of vast reverse-psychology conspiracy employed by people who make money off weddings.

OK. That's a lie. Well, not the part about women not flirting with me. But the ring on my finger is not to blame -- women rarely flirted with me before I was married. And the reason, I have come to realize, is that I am a doofus.

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Or dufus. I am such a doofus that I don't even know how to spell the word, and my trusty spell-check offers no guidance.

One of the key signs of my doofus-ness is the fact that, despite my clear difficulties with English, a great deal of my time is spent learning Welsh.

That's WelSH (not Welch); the native language of Wales (not Whales). If you know where Wales is, you're ahead of a lot of people I know. And you probably know that the rolling-popping-spitting native tongue of Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn't really rear its head much in the United States. When was the last time Rush Limbaugh complained about Welsh immigrants?

Along with not being overly useful, Welsh is often quite silly. On average, it rains some 200 days a year in Wales, but they don't have their own word for mud. They simply borrow an English word and spell it funny -- mwd (pronounced "mood"). Yet, they do have their own word for dandruff -- cen (pronounced "ken").

Fortunately, doofus that I am, I get a lot of use out of cen. I've got cen all over the place. I am a highly efficient producer of cen.

Have you ever been sick and, after burning through a fourth box of Kleenex, thought to yourself: "Where in the great googly-moogly is all this mucus coming from?"

I'm like that with cen. I do not understand how my scalp can produce so much dead skin. It's almost like a superpower: I am Snow-Globe, blinding evildoers by shaking my head.

While we're on the subject of my doofus personal hygiene, I don't know how to shave. I always do it wrong. I mean, how hard is it to shave? I've been shaving for years, but I still manage to cut myself almost every time! How can I be so stupid? How can I be so utterly incapable of mastering such a simple task?

I am also incompetent when it comes to cooking sausages. I have tried various heats, different pans, etcetera -- it never works. I'm serious, if you know how to cook a sausage in a pan, please write to me -- I'm desperate to know.

So the question to ask -- as I sit, my skin sloughing off at a rate higher than the mounting national debt, eating burnt sausages and pondering, "Pryd bydd fy nhanafiadau siafiwr yn wella?" (When will my shaving wounds heal?) -- is not why are girls not flirting with me, but why did they ever?

And more importantly, how did I end up married? As I've mentioned before, my wife's a pretty top-notch babe. Isn't it a bit strange that she ended up with me? Did I use bribery? Is she a masochist? Did she simply take pity on me?

I don't know. And I don't care. Only a doofus would waste his time with that question.

Chris Cope is married, with no children. His column appears every other Tuesday.