The person that sits behind my cubicle just asked a newcomer whose voice I do not know how she was. She replied positively and returned the question just to receive the answer she was probably expecting: ” Fine, fine, the long week-end is coming.”
I have never heard anyone saying their day was “pretty shitty as usual” or “was fine until I met you” and probably never will, at least not in this environment. If you are not willing to respond with a negative, it makes the question invalid, since the same answer will implicitely ensue. It turns it into a statement, a statement of politeness.
When I approach someone, I try to avoid this idiom and come up with another way of being polite. Asking questions whose answer you do not care about because you already know is quite rude in my opinion, yet, I hear this one going through every single hour…