Social skills have never come naturally to me. I’ve managed to get decent at interacting with people, but it’s taken years of study and practice.
When I was younger, I never knew the right thing to say. I still don’t.
But my bigger problem was knowing the wrong thing to say. Ideally before I said it. And then once I knew the wrong thing to say, not saying it anyway.
This is one of those things where the golden rule doesn’t really apply to me, where if I do unto others as I’d have them do unto me, they get extremely pissed off.
If someone is going to tell me something, I prefer the unvarnished truth. I’m ruthlessly self-critical and my mind tends to strip all the varnish off anyway.
Like if someone says, “let’s take that picture again. J looked a little, um, distracted.” I might reply, “Actually it looks like I’m having a stroke in that picture.”
I have learned that most people are not like this. If you go to someone’s recital and you think their singing sounds like feral cats having a three-way, most people don’t want to hear that. It doesn’t matter how true it is.
Also, you can say pretty much anything you want about me, as long as it’s funny. I think I’m completely ridiculous and I have no problem laughing at myself.
I have learned that this is not true for most people. Like if someone asks me if their outfit makes them look fat, you aren’t supposed to say, “No, your ass makes you look fat. The outfit is the least of your problems.”
See, I think that’s funny. If someone said that to me, I’d probably laugh along. But most people can’t look past the gratuitous insult. And the fact that everyone else is laughing actually makes it worse.
Anyway, in my early 20s, I decided to embrace this. If I said something true and/or funny and the person got offended, well, that’s just my way of weeding out the lightweights.
This actually worked pretty well. I managed to surround myself with people who could handle what I called “full-throttle J”. And I could just be myself.
Well, this works okay with your friends when you’re in college. It works less well with your coworkers when you’ve graduated and have a full-time job. I got a job as a software developer. Software people have a well-earned reputation for being awkward, which gave me some leeway. Still, if you see some guy that looks like a total douche nozzle, you might want to keep that to yourself, at least until you find out if that’s the guy running the company.
This meant not being myself, but part of being a grown-up means choosing between being your true, authentic self and being employed. And you can’t pay the bills with authenticity.
So, I started trying to work on the verbal filter and not saying the first thing that popped into my head. I made some progress, but it was slow.
In 2003, I was a bit past my early 20s. The entire tech economy had just cratered and it took my job with it.
So I ended up living in my parents basement in Wildwood, reading long Russian novels, and applying to grad school.
I had actually been accepted to law school, but that wasn’t going to start for several months.
So one morning while I was in the kitchen, eating Cap’n Crunch and reading Anna Karenina, when my mom dropped the newspaper on top of my book and said, “You need to find a job”.
St. Louis isn’t exactly a technology hot spot and the economy was still in the ditch. I was pessimistic.
But since I wasn’t paying rent, I thought it best to humor my mom. And right there, in the want ads of all places, a startup had posted a job that was more or less exactly the job I was just laid-off from.
So I sent in a resume and a few days later, I got a call for an interview.
The place was on the second floor of a former doctor’s office from the mid-1950s. It was at the top of a flight of very narrow, creaky
stairs. The place had that smell of an old building, and it reminded me of my grandmother’s house.
I was greeted at the top by two guys. Steve was in his mid-30s and about 6'5". Tom was in his mid-50s and about 5'6".
They led me to a conference room, which was actually very nice. Steve did most of the talking.
He said the product is an ultrasound imaging device for the treatment of prostate cancer. He pointed to a model of the device that was sitting on the table. Then he went to the whiteboard and launched into a brief description of ultrasound, and how it works.
At this point, I was completely distracted by the model, which looked pretty much like a dildo.
So Steve’s going on about sound waves, tissue impedance differentials, ceramic transducers. And I’m trying to pay attention, but it’s not working well.
Finally Steve got to the part where he asked if I had any questions.
Now, if my filter were working well, I would have said, “No, please continue”. But it wasn’t. So instead I said, “Does this thing work like I think it does?”
Tom knew where I was going with that, so he said, “Yes, this is inserted into the anus.”
I had about 70 replies pass through my head. But I didn’t say any of them. And somehow I didn’t start laughing.
I just froze for a second and said, “Okay”.
And then I got the job.
So that one time, right when I needed a filter, it started working.
And it changed my life.
I decided to defer law school for a year and see how this startup thing worked out. And a year after that, I decided not to do law school at all. Which is for the best. I’m a very slow reader and I detest paperwork. And reading and paperwork is pretty much all the law is! I have no idea why I thought law school was a good idea.
The people who knew me from way back when, the heavyweights, all agreed that if anyone was going to get a job writing software for anal probes, I would be that person.
And the job was great. The work was really interesting, the people were awesome. And once I got to know everyone, I was able to gradually turn the knobs up. They never quite got to see me go full-throttle, but the jokes were pretty much non-stop. If your job involves anal probes, there’s quite a bit of material you can work with.
And I got some really good stories out if it.
Like this one.
