Got the following email from someone in the PR department of a local restaurant school. (She’d helped me out last fall when I needed to find someone to talk to about hospitality management programs.)
Wow, she’s really wooing me! Gift certificate! Collateral! (collateral?) A free lunch – which, at a restaurant school, usually means good grub.
Unfortunately, I had no idea whatsoever what she was talking about, so I emailed back and asked if the message was intended for someone else with my (not excessively common) first name.
Does any language out there have a word for someone-waves-at-you-and-just-as-you-start-to-wave-back-you-realize-they-were-waving-to-someone-behind-you-so-you-casually-pretend-that-you-were-stretching-or-something?
Sounds similar, if not amplified in some respects.
Oh I so dislike it when that happens.
I’m horrible at remembering people I meet briefly, but I tend to have positions where I meet large groups of people when they are just meeting me so this happens a lot to me as I assume they are just someone I met and don’t remember.
Several months ago I was waiting for the elevator when a woman who was also waiting (after we had said hello in that non-commital way one does at the elevator bank) said, “I should have that report to you by tomorrow.” The fact that I didn’t know who she was or what she was talking about did not faze me, since I interact with dozens of people via email who might know me on sight. So I just said “OK, that’s fine,” like I knew what she was talking about.
We got on the elevator, and she made another comment about the reports, and this time it hit me–she thinks I am someone else. In fact, I had a pretty good idea who she thought I was, since there is only one person at the company who looks remotely like me (if he were to crouch down a few inches).
When her error was revealed, she was at first mortified but, seeing that I was merely amused, she had a good laugh as well. The funny thing is, I can’t remember now who she was or what she looked like.
If you’re going to have a word for that, you also have to have a word for someone-you-don’t-recognize-waves-at-you-but-because-you’re-not-sure-who-they-are-you-look-around-behind-you-like-a-moron-to-see-who-they’re-waving-at.
And a word for when someone walks up to you and addresses you by name but you don’t know who they are and you don’t want them to know that you don’t know their name.
Or even worse, when you recognize them and you should know their name and it’s kind of on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t get it and you don’t want them to know that either.
I am going to start an experiment where I pick a person at random each day and call them by the wrong name. The name I choose won’t even be close to their real name and may even be the wrong gender. For example, I would call “Jane” “Manuel”.
Or when you realize you’ve been working and/or socializing together for so long that to ask their name, at this point, would be so unspeakably rude that you can’t do it, so at the next Christmas party you let your spouse and/or friend stand there awkwardly for a few seconds before introducing themselves, and you wait just long enough for the mystery person to get their name out before you say, “OH! I’m such an idiot for not introducing you two! Jane, this is my husband!”
And then an hour later you’ve forgotten her name again.
Or you just avoid talking to them until you can see them from a distance and you’re with someone who also knows them, so you can whisper, “Who IS that?”
What about waving at someone, and then suddenly realizing that the person you were waving at is not who you thought it was, and was nobody that you know?
Why, yes – as a matter of fact this DID happen to me this weekend! Luckily I was in my car and she was driving the other direction.
I have a variant on that. I used to commute by bus and about every 2-3 months I would see this one guy that I used to talk to. He called me Paul (not my name) so I was Paul to him everytime I saw him. At first I didn’t want to correct him in case I heard it incorrectly, then I was sort of amused by it, then it was too late to do anything without upsetting him. So I was Paul. It wasn’t like I interacted with him all the time, just once in awhile. So it was easy to just be Paul in our conversations. Eventually it turned out we knew a few common people.
But I always wondered if one of those mutual friends would be talking to him and he would be going on about Paul what would happen? I can imagine the mutual friend saying 'who are you talking about? You sound like you are talking about Hakuna but who the hell is this Paul guy?"
How about the more modern phenomena, whereby someone talking on a Bluetooth headset (hidden, of course) is facing you and asks “How are you today?” or a similar social opener? And, when you bemusedly answer their query, they shoot you a dirty look for listening in on their conversation!
This happened to me a couple of months ago in the men’s room at work. A fellow pee-er at the urinal asked how my day was going. I responded, his response was a non-sequitor, and when I went “Buh?”, he motioned to his other ear and gave me an impatient look. Jerk!
I used to work retail and the Bluetooth thing irritated me like you wouldn’t believe! The women who walked around talking into them were all the same type of person; self important, look at me types who were usually just talking to their sister or gal pal or something. What kind of a moron looks at someone and says “How are you doing?” and then is irritated when you respond because they’re really talking on their phone that you can’t even see?
