AwkwardRules

This is a great awkward rule from Paul Van Slembrouck. If you’d like to suggest a rule or a situation, email awkwardrules@gmail.com and if I post it I’ll link to you. You could be getting tens of hits to your site!

The situation - You’re taking the bus in an unfamiliar city. You’ve taken the wrong line or missed a station because all of a sudden you’re in what looks like a bad neighborhood. You get off the bus and look around to figure out where you are. One of the people that got off the bus, a disheveled looking man, asks, “hey you need help?” He has crazy/scary eyes so you say, “no thanks, I know where I’m going”.

Fig 1. Notice seemingly scary crazy-eyed follow walker.

Now you have to demonstrate that you know where you’re going, so you start walking in a random direction. Then you realize where you are and remember that you should actually head back to the bus stop and take a different bus. You turn around and you see the man on the way back, and he shakes his head sadly at your lack of faith in humanity. You get back to the stop, and then one of the people hanging out near the bus stop leans over and says, “That guy you refused directions from is J.D. Salinger, he hasn’t talked to anyone in 20 years until today when he asked if you needed help. Maybe now you’ll learn not to judge a book by its cover.”

This situation could have been much less awkward if you had followed -


AwkwardRule #11: Refusing directions in unfamiliar/scary environments

After you have refused directions in an unfamiliar / scary environment follow these guidelines:

• Maintain posture, expression, direction, and pace such that it appears that you know exactly where you are going.
• Mentally create and navigate spatial models and estimate probabilities that you should be heading in a direction other than the current heading. For example, dark alleys are the wrong way 99% of the time.

Should you need to change course, it must be inconspicuous. Abruptly doing a 180 degree turn could create substantial awkwardness as described above. The awkwardness factor increases with the amount of time spent in close proximity of other walkers, especially if you have refused directions from them.

Fig 2. Showing the complex variables that must be juggled in order to non-awkwardly refuse directions.

Here are some strategies to allow you to change directions without showing that you didn’t know where you were going:

The situation - You’re visiting your hometown, perhaps for Thanksgiving. You go to the supermarket to get something your mom needs to make dinner and you hear someone call your name. You turn around to see someone that looks familiar - it’s that person you kind of knew in high school. You get into a conversation, and then realize that it’s lasted longer than the sum of all of your previous conversations with this person in high school.

Figure 1. Comparing conversations in high school to present day conversation. Note that sophomore year is not shown because there was no conversation.

Soon the question “So what are you doing now?” inevitably comes up.  You answer, “Oh I’m <current thing you’re doing> in <current city you live in>, how about you?”  Now it’s a crapshoot. The worst case scenario is if they answer, “I’m just working here at the supermarket”, you feel like a douchebag for talking about your job in <current city you live in>. Or they say something that sounds pretty awesome, and you wish you would have made what you’re doing sound cooler.

Then there’s the case where you see the person you kind of knew in high school at some place that’s really far from your hometown, in which case the conversation is usually interesting*. But what if it’s only the next town over from where you live? Is it still noteworthy?

The following rule will help you in this situation:

AwkwardRule #10: Running into people you kind of knew in High School

For the purposes of this rule, the person you kind of knew in high school (PYKOKIHS) shall be defined as:

1. A person that you bear no ill will toward, and may even like, but for whatever reason you just never really spent any time with them in high school.
2. Someone you don’t know at all outside of high school. So for example if you knew them well in middle school, or they were on your sports team they don’t qualify as a PYKOKIHS.

Adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Have them say what they do first - Just like in negotiation, you gain the biggest advantage by having them talk first. This way, once they tell you what they do, you can adjust what you say. So for example, if they were to say, “Oh, I’m just working here at Chipotle” and you’re a U.S. Senator, you could say that you’re “just doing some government job.” Or if you’re a crack dealer and the other person is an executive at a fortune 500 company, you could say that you’re an entrepreneur and you run your own business with a product your customers can’t seem to get enough of.

2. Conversational time limit - If you’re in your hometown and there’s nothing really remarkable about the person being there as well, try to limit your conversation to the sum of all your previous conversations with the person. However, if you see the person outside your hometown, multiply the time limit by D, where D is the distance from your hometown to where you are now. For example, if you went to high school in Rochester Hills, MI and you see someone in Boulder, CO, you multiply your time limit by 1,302 because it’s pretty interesting that you ran into them so far away from home. Here is the exact formula:

Time Limit = (Sum of Previous Conversations) * (Distance from hometown to current location + 1)

Amendment from Kevin Owocki and MWay - Holiday Time Multiplier Factor

A Holiday Time Multiplier Factor shall be applied to the time limit above. The HTMF shall be defined as:

HTMF = 1 / ((duration of holiday in days (1 to 30)) * (total holidays) * (%people who observe holiday and go home (1 to 100)))

Any other suggestions for amendments to the rule?  What do you do when this happens to you?

Credits: Michael Dagitses came up with the idea of a distance-based multiplier on conversation time limit. I would like to note for the record that he has a very sad site, and his neglect is a form of abuse affecting the entire internets.

* This actually happened to me right before I was going to post this rule! I ran into a person I knew pretty well in middle school, but not that well in high school, and her friend who I only kind of knew in high school (we had a big high school, almost 2,000 students). Unfortunately I had only written the situation part, and not the rule part. Luckily they are both doing cool things here in Colorado, and it was fun/interesting running into them!