The Horrors of Social Interaction

On Sunday, our church and another local church had a combined Easter service at Clowes Hall. This is the one opportunity each year for all 800+ people who usually attend one of our three services on a given Sunday to all be in the same room at the same time. Pastries and coffee were available, and people were invited to mingle for an hour or so prior to the service. Now this is sort of a nightmare for yours truly, because if I know one thing about myself, it's that I'm a fairly crappy mingler (is this really a word?). My usual approach might be to show up about 15 minutes prior to the service and mingle briefly before nervously heading for the cheap seats. In this instance, Erin had to be present an hour early since she was one of the scheduled toddler teachers for the morning. (Teacher is probably a loose term, in this case. She spent two hours cleaning refuse from the tails other people's offspring; not a job I will volunteer for without coersion.) This left me with few options, so I began circling. What I discovered is that the best guy to mingle with at such an event is the guy shelling out the pastries. Not only is he always available, but he's providing me something with which to stuff my face, leaving me inable to converse without crumb spewage. So I repeatedly circled back to his table, each time pretending I'd never seen his selections before, choosily grabbing whatever I hadn't already sampled. (Now I know at least one of the elders from our church reads this, so he can contact me later to verify just how much I really ate and bill me appropriately.) Luckily after several pounds of danish, my sister and brother-in-law arrived, providing me with someone safe with which to converse.

All of this got me to thinking about a prior awkward mingling experience. When I was in middle and high school, I was a frequent user of local BBS's around Indianapolis. That sentence hopelessly dates me, and for those not in the know, BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems) were a precusor to the Internet. User's used their home computer to dial over the phone into someone else's computer, where programs and e-mail could be exchanged with other users of that BBS. There were dozens of BBS's in the area, and occasionally, some brilliant computer nerd would get the idea to have a BBS BBQ, allowing for the BBS users around town to meet face to face with other, previously faceless, BBS users they might "know" from around town. There were several flaws with this plan.

First off, computer users are, by defintion, not socially adept or compatible creatures. They sit around at night staring at dimly lit computer screens, praying it will someday lead to a chance encounter with a member of the opposite sex. (The "opposite" part of that sentence frequently backfires, given the anonymity involved in BBS usage.)

Second, one of the primary tennets of BBS usage was that you had to continually pick fights with the other users, just to keep the "conversations" going online. (This frequently involved a lot of profanity, often from middle school students masquerading as adults.) This brings up the third problem.

Much like the Internet today, you frequently were misled regarding the age and/or gender of the people you were dealing with. This can create an ugly scenario during a face to face introduction. You thought you'd been chatting with 25 year old Mary when actually it was 52 year old Marvin. And finally, the ratio of actual males to actual females on BBS's was approximately 1000 to 1.

All of this should be creating an image in your mind of a group of men of varying age (and perhaps one unfortunate looking woman) hanging around a strangers house on a weekend, none having ever met before, none having any real understanding of social cues, all having stayed up until approximately 4:30am the night prior fiddling around on the BBSs, all now trying to mingle in an impossibly awkward situation.

For whatever reason, I subjected my buddy Eric to one of these things while we were in high school. I have no idea, really, what we were thinking. We both had girlfriends, and all our presence at such an event could do was degrade our already damaged social status, ensuring that those girls would most assuredly ditch us if they found out we had attended such an affair. I don't think we stayed long, but through some break in logic and the space-time continuum, after seeing this gathering of Indy's most rabid computer users, I still decided to go into Computer Engineering. What I guess I failed to understand at the time was that this meeting was a glimpse into the future, as it looked very similar to virtually all of my undergraduate engineering classes -- with a slightly better male to female ratio. Yet another brilliant decision by yours truly.

(For those who've read this far, there will be more pictures of Grant up soon. I'm well aware that me rambling is only a distraction from the real reason for you checking our blog. The only immediate Grant update is that following our lovely Easter service at church and Easter dinner with the grandparents, around 8:30pm last night, Grant decided to attempt to wake the dead on his own for approximately an hour. The boy has lungs. He was his usual, cheery self following a bath to remove the beads of sweat he was soaked with while screaming his head off. Ah, parenting...)