How are you doin'?

In my coffee place this morning I heard this exchange, A: "How are you doin'?" B: "I don't know". A:"You don't know how
you're doin'?"...At this point B was silent, instead of saying, "I know you're just engaging in a social pleasantry, and you don't
really want to know, how I'm doing, so why should I tell you anything more?". It's often occurred to me that on being asked this question, if you were to launch into a litany about your slipped disc, your migraines, and your triple hernia, the asker of
the question, would recoil in horror...[maybe one of these days I'll try that approach]. I suspect most people answer "fine", to
stop that line of questioning in its tracks, when, often, this might be the furthest thing from the truth. I think that asking
this question, usually, has nothing to do, with wanting to know about someone's state at the time. but is done as a "starter upper", as insincere as it may be. In some parts of the world, however, people don't go the insincere route. In my own country of origin, Guyana, I think the people have come up with an honest way of dealing with this question. The response in the local dialect is, "Me deh", which means "I am" or "I am here". What a succinct and straightforward response that is!...the equivalent of, "you see me standing before you here, and that's all you really need to know right now". So...the next time in my adopted country, someone asks me this question, that no-one, usually, wants to know the answer to, I'll revert to my roots, and hit them with a quick, "Me deh!", and leave them to figure out what that means, rather than lay a lie on them, out of anymore insincere politeness. Quester.