Quote of the Day

[andrewducker]

Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is staring at a stranger, all he’s thinking is, “I have no system for understanding this messy person in front of me”. This is where the shy comes from. This is why nerds hate presenting to crowds.

The skills to interact with other people are there. They just lack a well-defined system.

From The Nerds Handbook
Which seems to be more of a handbook for dealing with nerds than one for nerds to read.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I've had to work hard on this one:

You’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

Information that your nerd is exposed to when the irrelevance flag is waving is forgotten almost immediately. I mean it. Next time you hear “Cool”, I want you to ask, “What’d I just say?” That awkward grin on your nerd’s face is the first step in getting him to acknowledge that he’s the problem in this particular conversation.

Because "Cool" may well be the word I use the most in this situation, and it's taken me a fair amount of effort to actually concentrate and engage. I think I'm getting there though.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Nerds for Dummies?

[cdave]

I don't stare at people. Eye contact is difficult.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Sounds less like a manual for nerds and more like an excuse to propagate the idea that being a nerd means being introverted and socially inept. For those nerds among us that are extroverted and socially capable, that's getting to be a really really tired old stereotype.

[redshira.livejournal.com]

I read this to James and confusion ensued. He said "I don't know smalltalk," and when I said "I don't know small talk either" he went *perplexed face* "I thought you were talking about smalltalk the programming language!" So his brain immediately zoomed off into "oh well yes I can see how it would be tricky trying to deal with your social interactions according to the neat framework of smalltalk" and we have just spent ten minutes trying to untangle what he said vs what he meant vs how I understand it.

Which is just a perfect example, really :)

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

This was my train of thought when reading this post:

"Smalltalk? The bane of a nerds existence? Sure, there are probably better supported programming languages but... ooooh, right."

I may have a problem.