Plane Talk
Jan. 29th, 2006 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marcusmarcusrcPoll: Under what conditions do you talk to the person sitting next to you on a plane?
1) Always. Especially if it annoys them.
2) Usually. I meet interesting people this way.
3) Only if they are cute.
4) Rarely. Too shy.
5) Never. I put on sound-canceling headphones, bury myself in a book, and glare at anyone who looks like they are even thinking about bothering me.
Just wondering, because I had long conversations with my seat-neighbor both to and from Miami. On the way there I met a commodities trader. He and I had an overlapping interest in the future of natural gas prices. On the way back, I met a woman who works on user interfaces for productivity enhancement tools at GE. In other trips I've met everything from a Seventh Day Adventist to a nuclear missile silo technicians, from a blind woman with a really cool computer setup on her way to lobby Congress to a kid traveling from his dad's house to his mom's house, from a guy who sang next to VEG at their ward's choir to a prefrosh visiting MIT. My mom always had the superpower of being able to extract life stories 5 minutes after she bumps into a stranger in a supermarket or a street corner. I seem have a lesser version of this talent that mostly only works in planes.
1) Always. Especially if it annoys them.
2) Usually. I meet interesting people this way.
3) Only if they are cute.
4) Rarely. Too shy.
5) Never. I put on sound-canceling headphones, bury myself in a book, and glare at anyone who looks like they are even thinking about bothering me.
Just wondering, because I had long conversations with my seat-neighbor both to and from Miami. On the way there I met a commodities trader. He and I had an overlapping interest in the future of natural gas prices. On the way back, I met a woman who works on user interfaces for productivity enhancement tools at GE. In other trips I've met everything from a Seventh Day Adventist to a nuclear missile silo technicians, from a blind woman with a really cool computer setup on her way to lobby Congress to a kid traveling from his dad's house to his mom's house, from a guy who sang next to VEG at their ward's choir to a prefrosh visiting MIT. My mom always had the superpower of being able to extract life stories 5 minutes after she bumps into a stranger in a supermarket or a street corner. I seem have a lesser version of this talent that mostly only works in planes.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-29 06:14 am (UTC)What's your secret? How do you get conversation started and what sort of questions do you ask?
no subject
Date: 2006-01-29 08:39 am (UTC)The GE person was putting away a passport, so I asked if she was coming back from someplace interesting. If I'd gotten a 2 word answer, I would have nodded and pulled out my book. Instead, I got a long answer about Phuket and the neat reserve of rescued gibbons that she'd visited, etc. etc. that indicated a desire for conversation. (she'd also been traveling for 20+ hours at that point, so I think she was looking for new ways to distract herself)
Usually on a several hour flight there are a couple opportunities for a "hook" and then I gauge whether or not the person was just answering to be polite or if they actually want to talk. And a surprising number of people seem to fall into the "want to talk" category.
Mind you, I also probably do a lot of traveling between conferences, weddings, and visiting family, so while I accumulate a lot of stories about people I've sat next to, I also read a rather large numbers of books and do a lot of sleeping during my travels as well. (And really, I can usually manage to read a book _and_ have a long conversation _and_ take a nap all on the same flight)