A Little Less Conversation

Back in the days when I had dropped out of college and was working data entry, one of my typical goals for a day at work was not to say anything to anybody. I wasn’t scornful of my colleagues; rather, I suffered from a social anxiety disorder that had left me both scared as hell of talking and clueless about the little cues and filler responses and low-risk gambits that characterize typical workplace conversation. When someone asked "How are you?" I would freeze up — even at 19 years old, I hadn’t realized that I was supposed to say "Fine" rather than actually describe how I was. Since then, I’ve picked up the method of workplace conversation.

Typically, when the weather starts heating up in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, office conversation turns to that topic and addresses it thusly (though not in these words specifically):

Person #1: Hey, it’s hot and humid.

Person #2: Yes. I find it unpleasant.

Person #1: As do I.

(Optional) Person #3 (with intrusive bonhomie): Hey, you talking about the weather?

Person #2: Yeah.

Person #3: Man, is it unpleasant!

Person #1: Yup.

This is repeated until someone gets bored to tears and wanders off. Sometimes I try to jazz it up a little:

Person #1: Hey, it’s hot and humid.

Andrew: You’ve lived in Washington for 20 years, right?

Person #1: Yeah.

Andrew: And you’re surprised that our summers are unpleasant?

Person #1: No, I just don’t like them.

Andrew: Why don’t you move to San Diego?

Person #1: Huh.

The "Huh" is one of the sounds people make when you didn’t do the dance right.

Yet even people who have more patience than I with workplace conversation are finding it difficult to navigate Washington’s newest hot topic: The cicadas, the billions of red-eyed bugs that emerge from the ground every seventeen years looking to score and thus perpetuate the species, leaving their exoskeletons lying around everywhere and flying into people’s mouths because they don’t realize that a human's mouth is a deadly place to be.

I am of the minority opinion that the cicadas are pretty cool. They don't want anything from humans; they just want to feed and make sweet cicada love and collectively sound like a gigantic ondes martinot. Amazingly, unlike most of my minority opinions, more people than just me think this. Contrastingly, lots of people, mostly women, think one single cicada is the most repulsive thing that ever existed and having billions of them around just makes everything a billion times more repulsive. So all over Washington, conversations are proceeding thusly:

Female Person: I was walking to work today and the cicadas were flying all around.

Male Person (noncommittal): Yup, there are a lot out there.

Female Person: I just can't stand them! Why can't they just crawl back into the ground and die!

Male Person: Oh, come on. I like the cicadas.

Female Person (disgusted at Male Person by association): Why?!

Male Person: They're pretty cool. They're just trying to do their thing.

Female Person: But they're everywhere! They're so ugly and gross! They fly right into you!

Male Person: They don't know any better.

Female Person: Meh.

Male Person (thinking "Oh, grow up"): Huh.

Female Person: I'm serious! Jerk.

This conversation fails because the two people involved are not in agreement as to what the conventional responses are. Of course, there are some questions with no conventional answer at all, which means you can't ask them at work, but which is not to say I'm not tempted to ask them:

• "Do you think these gray hallways and carpets are designed to deaden our senses and thus repress dissent?"
• "Why is the vast majority of our supervisors white and the vast majority of our support staff black?"
• "If I died tomorrow at my desk, other people would finish up my projects and you'd hire someone else to work in my cube, right?"

Workplace conversation does serve a purpose. That purpose is obscured because it's a speech act, which is to say its meaning isn't in what you say but in the fact that you say it. In fact, the little dribbles and drabbles mean different things depending on who you drib and drab with:

• Someone you like: Hey, what's up? Got anything interesting to say? Because I don't, or I wouldn't have asked you about the weather.
• Someone you feel vaguely positive towards but to whom you don't have anything specific to say right now: Hey, what's up? We're in this together. Maybe sometimes we'll talk for real.
• Someone you don't particularly like for no reason and who doesn't particularly like you for no reason: See, we can be polite to each other despite our vague animosity. Remember this if I ever actually need you to do anything for me or if we accidentally sit next to each other on the subway sometime.
• Someone you dislike for extremely good reasons who is clueless about it: You are so dumb you're not worth getting mad at. (Well, this is more of a speech act to yourself or anyone who knows your feelings and is watching.)
• Someone you've had a public feud with: I dare you to get into it with me again, because I'm going to be holding the high ground forever, jackass.
• Your supervisors: I like regular and generous raises.
• Someone on your support staff, if he or she doesn't seem to like you: Please don't take this report and make paper airplanes out of it.

Workplace conversation is merely one of the many arts I learned as part of defeating my social anxiety disorder. If I do this again, I'll probably either talk about conversations with people I'm attracted to or conversations with people I see randomly in the hall in my apartment building. It depends on the weather. Which was quite nice today, by the way. Didn't you think? Huh.

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