I hear you on the inconsistency. In my case, it often seems to go in waves with rather long ups and downs. Sometimes, when I’m in a really bad way with beating myself up over social situations a lot, I have to remind myself, “Dude, why are you behaving like this? Not that long ago, while working at X job, you were basically fine for a year straight.”
It’s like I run out of “normal person juice” and regress back to weirdo again.
Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes of all time: “What do engineers use for birth control?”
A: Their personalities
{Anybody who knows how to do that “spoiler” thing and would be willing to share with me how that’s done I would VERY much appreciate it!}
Write:
[noparse]stuff[/noparse]
It comes out as:
stuff
Use your strengths. I have bad ADHD, and have a lot of curiosity. Therefore, I know a little bit about many things. I quickly try to figure out what someone’s primary and secondary interests are, and then use whatever bit of knowledge I’ve randomly picked up regarding one of their interests to get them talking about it. I just ask a couple of openish-ended questions, and let them rattle on, with the occasional follow-up question. You can get almost anyone talking if you can find out their favorite topic and/or whatever is occupying their mind at the moment. It’s not even that hard with all but the most introverted/shy people.
It has gotten a lot easier to do this as I’ve gotten older, because I pick up more random knowledge (and just life experience) along the way.
I think I see a problematic pattern. You have these events you see as failures. But the thing is, you have to fail to be able to learn. Sure, you learn from modeling others, but you also just learn by doing, and if it doesn’t work, you don’t do that anymore.
Failure should not be seen as something to regret but as a stepping stone to learning.
I stammer, I flop sweat, I make ill timed jokes that have to be explained. I feel out of place. I feel like I’m being judged. Social cues are hard to learn at this age (mid 40’s). I found a MeetUp group with some people that I already have some commonalities and that has actually helped. With social situations, I never felt like I knew enough about the people around me, with the MeetUp group it helps to have some built-in common ground.
I don’t think I’ve gotten better at social cues, I’ve just tried to be around people who I trust not to judge. Public speaking is still out of the question, but I can chit chat with co-workers and my MeetUp group.
My issues are a little backwards though. I personally don’t think my life is all that interesting and I can’t believe the minutia of my life would be interesting to others. It baffling that my co-workers are eager to share their details, I would never be so bold to believe that they would be interested in my details. It’s not that I hate talking about myself, but I feel there is just so much background information needed to really understand my life that’s it’s not really worth the effort. For example, I rarely talk about my work because to understand you would have to know the people I deal with, the work I do, etc. It’s hard for me to phrase stuff in a universal, concise way.
Oh man I love engineer jokes XD.
How do you tell when an engineer likes a girl?
He stares at her shoes instead of his own
Exactly but you seem to have missed the detail that in my scenarios I was “corrected” (using training terminology) for having right behavior and in one case not corrected when I was wrong. I had the same mentality that Martian Bigfoot described where I assumed that when I was corrected it was because I did something wrong rather than just the other person being rude. So my point was that I am learning from trial and error but half the time I learn the WRONG lesson. Or put another way, when I was “corrected” by the rude people when I tried good social behavior I thought it meant that my behavior was wrong, so I didn’t do it anymore. I would call that a brick wall on the road to learning!
I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I do think I’m interesting and have some good stories to tell. But most of the time if I start to mention them, I get shut down. Like the dude who didn’t want to hear about my new job. I also spent almost a decade working for a 911 agency. I don’t expect everybody to agree with me, but I really do think that SOME people should think 911 is interesting. However in the time I worked there, whenever someone asked me what I did for a living, as soon as I said I worked for 911, they’d change the subject. So just reinforcing me to not talk about myself, so it will continue to be hard to get to know me. This happens rather a lot.
It seems as though you are looking at social situations in a very black-and-white way, where people are either right or wrong. I don’t think it really works that way most of the time. In both of the examples in the OP, I don’t think you did anything wrong. But I don’t think the other people necessarily did anything wrong either. Obviously, I wasn’t there, so I can’t judge things like tone of voice or body language. But in the example of “Hi, how are you?”/“Great, I got a new job”, what did you expect from the encounter? “Hi, how are you?” is usually a social convention where people aren’t really interested in a lengthy explanation of how you actually are. “Fine, thanks, how are you?” is all that most people expect. Maybe the guy was afraid he would get trapped into a long conversation when all he wanted was a conventional greeting. Pretending the doorbell had rung seems like a bizarre, sit-com response, but maybe he genuinely thought he heard the doorbell and was embarrassed when he realized it hadn’t? Who knows?
As for the other situation, if you were waiting there expectantly, maybe the manager thought you had something important to ask, probably job-related. So his question sounds fine to me. Or maybe he was involved in a private conversation. Again, who knows? Both the encounters seem like ordinary social situations to me.
Yeah, I’ve always tended to operate on the assumption that everyone else basically know what they are doing. Problem is, some of them really don’t. It’s frustrating, because this stuff is hard enough with me being socially clueless, but with other people acting like idiots, too? Oh, man. Can’t you people get your act together? 
Yes, I know, like the world exists to function like an instruction manual for me.
To make it worse, sometimes I turn it back on myself again. I said earlier that I’m the happiest when I watch someone else screw up socially, but that’s really only if I’m not directly involved in the situation, or if I can get out of it quickly. As I said, I always take the blame, and dealing with other people being rude/clueless is another skill that I’m clueless about. So then I worry about not knowing how to do that, and it becomes all about me again, even when it isn’t.
That’s another one of those irrational feelings that I walk around with, and it’s related to the “always my fault” thing: Other people are *allowed *to be socially awkward, while I’m not. It’s like there are two sets of rules. Somehow, they do things wrong in a right way, while I do it wrong in a wrong way.
Which also can’t possibly make any sense.
In what way? Like, saying “you”, and in their native tongue you only said that if you were insulting somebody and normally you would just use the understood “you”, and otherwise it’s emphasis?
snipped quote for space
I think they still Do have charm school, even for adults.
Another possibility to consider is “Toastmaster’s”. I haven’t done it, but my sister swears by it. Basically, from her descriptions, it sound almost, kinda like, AA for the shy. At least it gets you out with a group of people interested in socializing on a regular basis.
Another vote for Toastmasters International.
I have no advice to give but it sounds like Martian Bigfoot and I are twins in the over analysis and introversion categories!
Make that triplets because Martian Bigfoot sounds just like me, too.
FWIW, I am in Toastmasters, and I disagree with you guys on that. It’s teaching me how to be a confident speaker in front of a group but nothing whatsoever about manners or social etiquette.
Here’s a question along etiquette lines: say you’re in the kitchen at work getting some water. There’s nobody else in there. While you’re filling your cup, a coworker quietly walks in and starts digging in the fridge - doesn’t say anything to you. Because your back was turned, you also didn’t say hi or anything. But as you turn around to walk out, then you notice him. Do you say hi, or just walk out without saying anything?
I’m often in this situation and don’t know if I’m being rude by just quietly walking out of the room. If they catch my eye, I absolutely acknowledge their presence by saying hi. But otherwise, I don’t.
They had a problem with he/her/she/they and wanted a proper name used instead.
She went to buy milk.:mad:
Jill went to buy milk:)
But what was their native tongue, and is it a holdover from that?
You’re overthinking things. There’s no right or wrong thing to do in that situation, it depends on both people, and their temperaments, and the timing, and the day that they are having. You could say hi, or just give a polite nod of acknowledgement, or ignore them. I think ignoring them is fine unless you catch each other’s eye.
Having awkward moments in the office is inevitable, whether when walking down the hallway, or being in the breakroom or bathroom, or being at a meeting, or any number of other places. If you’re having too many awkward moments with a certain person, then you can try to avoid them a bit, or to try to befriend them so things aren’t so awkward.
I sometimes think that the socially-adept people aren’t the ones who know the answer to that question, they’re the ones who don’t even ask it of themselves.
You’re essentially asking yourself “what does that other person expect of me in this situation?” but it’s equally valid to ask “what do I expect of him?” Do you want some social interaction when you’re getting a cup of water from the sink? Your desires are important, too.
It’s possible to take that line of thinking too far, and to be too self-absorbed, but I think it’s also possible to not take it far enough. As to how to get there, I couldn’t tell you. Like I said, I’m in the same boat with y’all.