Richard defines "single-serving friends": “People you meet on an airplane or bus or wherever. You don't intend to talk to them...but sometimes circumstances cause you to need to. Or like on a plane you're sitting next to them so you kinda have to talk to them. and then you never see or talk to that person ever again.”

I get that all the time when I take the bus down to Portland. Never on the Canadian side, mind you, but if Americans don't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably seize up. My favourites so far are man who was sent back from the border because he neglected to alert the Canadian officials of his felony conviction and the cute black girl on the trip from Portland to Seattle. Even on public transit in Portland, people just start talking to me, and I try to disregard any feelings of insecurity in exchange for someone to talk to. (Try talking to a stranger on the bus in Vancouver and observe their confused facial expression.)

The trick, it seems then, is to figure out how to turn the strangers on the bus in to single-serving friends, and then, once that has been achieved, turning single-serving friends into multiple servings.