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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-29 02:10 pm (UTC)I don't say any more than "hello", "thank you", "excuse me", etc to people
on a little over half the flights that I take. On most of the rest I'll have
around 5-10 minutes of conversation, generally inspired by something
(like problems with the plane, a book they're reading, etc). Once in awhile,
but rarely, I'll make a connection with someone and we'll have an extended conversation.