A Rant: Greeting People

I hate greeting people.

I didn't really realize this until this week because I have had an unusually high number of awkward passings-by since my return to Provo. I offer one quick example:


I was wandering down the sidewalk enjoying the evening air, not looking at any of the people coming towards me, when, as you might expect, an unexpected person saw me and decided to make their presence known. I hear my name said with a really odd interrogative tone—I say odd because the fact that the tone was interrogative suggested an uncertainty about whether or not I was the person he was addressing, and yet his volume was such that there was no way someone could have ignored it if they weren't actually me. Maybe I'm just the weird shy one here, but if I'm not sure that I'm addressing the person I think I'm addressing, I do not use the 300-yard shout within the cloistered 3 feet of usable space on the sidewalk.

So after being clobbered in close-quarters with this unsettling and brash uncertainty, I recognize the perpetrator—someone whom I quickly found to be socially-awkwardly-creepy about seven years ago and subsequently tried to avoid, I dunno, all the time. In resting my eyes upon this individual, I saw that the bizarre interrogative tone was accompanied by a strange interrogative posture. Kind of like this:

Okay, sans crazy eyes. But you get the idea. It was like he was trying to make up for the 300-yard shout with this super interrogative posture. Instead, it just made the run-in creepier because it was like he was shocked by my very presence, despite the fact that we had an awkward run-in during finals week. He knows I live here! Anyways, this is just super detailed background for how the actual conversation went. Which was like this:

Him: Kayla!????!!??!??!?!???!???!!!! (Click to see my post Pet Peeve: Guess What for a little on why I hate "?!" so much)Me: Oh! Hi! [Shocked and dismayed at seeing this person because of aforementioned socially-awkward-creepiness.]
Him: What's up? [Or some similar question posed to indicate interest in the other person's life without really expecting or desiring an answer to the question.]
Me: [So shocked, dismayed, and disoriented by the weirdness of the conversation that can't form words and compute what question was actually asked. Result: turned other way and had verbal vomit in form of mumbling something like...] Good .... ? [Note weird interrogative tone because recognized that "Good" might have been wrong answer to question.]

How embarrassing. Not that I care in the slightest about his opinion of me, but I do so hate to loose my composure like that. Who knew all my coolness could be derailed so easily? (Or maybe I'm not as cool as I think ... [entirely possible and extremely likely].)

This scenario brings up a few problems with the way we greet each other. As I see it, greeting people that you don't spend a lot of time with is a lot like holding the door open for someone, so I'm going to use the following illustration as a jump-off point for this whole greeting-people problem.

Let's say you see someone you know coming towards you. If they're far enough away that they're in the awkward zone, STOP. DO NOT BEGIN CONVERSATION. Why? Because of all the little people you're going to trap awkwardly in the air space between your conversation! It's not a fun place for them to be. (Believe me, I know this from personal experience.) Furthermore, you're going to run into another problem which I like to call "Too Much Space, Too Little Conversation" or, conversely, "Too Little Space, Too Much Conversation." It can really go either way, depending on how bold you are in continuing the conversation after the necessary pleasantries are completed.

If, on the one hand, you are very bold, you end up starting a conversation that you don't have time to finish without stopping. (And we're going to assume that you aren't able to stop, because if we didn't, I'd have too many possible scenarios bouncing around in my head.) On the other hand, if you aren't very bold, but you stop the conversation too early, you've got all this extra time where you both know you've got nothing more to say to each other. Awkie.

Once safely within the courtesy zone, we have to deal with this awful societal beast I call the Necessary Pleasantries. For some reason, we've got this idea that in order to be polite, we need to act interested in the other person's life. The best way to do this, as far as we've figured out, is to ask simple questions. "What's up? How's it going? How are you?"

Unfortunately for us, we picked simple questions that don't have simple answers. And apparently we weren't quick enough on the draw to stop this horrendous misstep in creating social conventions, and so we went with Plan B which was to make up basic, meaningless answers to each of these questions. "Not much. Good. Fine." Congrats, humanity. Now we have the psychological repercussions of feeling like we should feel good about interacting with each other while simultaneously recognizing that our interaction was completely meaningless, and therefore being unable to actually feel good about it. Well done. (snarksnarksnark). The good side of these answers is that a conversation made in passing can happen very quickly and easily. We can happily acknowledge each other, fake a little interest with meaningless prattle, and go on our merry way without disturbing our forward momentum.

This, apparently, was not good enough for us though. Over the course of time, we've tried to make these Necessary Pleasantries a little more interesting by shaking up our answers. "Great. Lovely. Doing wonderfully, thanks."

EEEEEEEEEKKKKKKK. Time to put on the brakes everyone! This is a BAD IDEA. Why? Well, there are a couple of reasons:

1. The more you shake things up, the more likely you are to overrun your allotted time for passing conversation, which then leads to this whole problem of trying to finish the conversation and having to twist your neck to maintain the eye contact, turn around and start walking backwards (super dangerous), or feel super weird answering the question while you're no longer facing the person. Way too many problems happening here to even be dealt with. 
2. If you start throwing in a bunch of other possible answers to these usual questions, it can get really confusing for people who are trying to answer your question...

... like when you run into them unexpectedly and throw off their groove so that they, in their victimized state of disorientation, find it completely impossible to narrow down the list of possible answers to ones which are question-appropriate, and ultimately pick the wrong one causing loads of undue stress and embarrassment. 

Thanks a lot, society. 

snarksnarksnarksnarksnark.