Tonight on Fox: When Good Interactions Go Bad
I should have known that it was bad mojo when my audience was scheduled for 3pm. How much someone gives a crap about a meeting is directly correlated with how early in the day they fit it into their schedule, so right off the bat I'd been categorized as an administrative duty to discharge. Not the best basis for a serious conversation, but rather than reschedule I figured from past successes I could generate interest by sheer force of enthusiasm.
When I arrived, he was still speaking with another student; as I hastened past the open door, waving briefly to signal my presence, I noticed he was halfway through the motion of handing a tissue box to the young lady. Huh, let's hope she just has allergies. As she emerged from his office, I made eye contact with her and gave a small but friendly smile. She tried to do likewise, but it was forced. More bad mojo, but too late to pull out now.
I walk into the office, he motions for me to have a seat. I sit, and he says nothing -- just stares at me with slightly raised eyebrows and an expectant look. I let the silence linger for a moment. No pleasantries. Fuck -- where's the eject button? He's looking at me with that well-you-wanted-to-see-me-so-go-on-already face, so I just take a deep breath and make the plunge. I knew I should have brought some kava with me today -- just keeping my speech at a normal cadence is going to take an act of will at this point, having gone from a 3 to a 7 on the Sense of Impending Doom scale in the span of about a minute.
"Well, what I wanted to talk with you about was . . ."
I don't remember precisely what I said after that, having thought it over beforehand enough that I could trust my autopilot for the opening volley. And a damn good thing too, because now I needed that attentive bandwidth to gauge how deep I'd stepped in it, and which way was up so I knew where to dig. After about ten to fifteen seconds he'd apparently heard enough to interrupt me.
"So you're looking for life advice."
I wasn't, and was stupid enough to start to correct his misapprehension. D'oh -- I really need to get over this "no truth left behind" impulse. I recovered the fumble by spinning it into a question about what other professors I should speak to about biophysical matters -- a simple request for information that I didn't really need, then I could excuse myself.
Somehow his response ended up getting intertwined with suggestions about my courses, concerning matters I'd already considered and made up my mind about. At this point I was in possession of my wits enough to realize that it would be faster to just nod along than even begin to attempt an explanation of how I was already several steps ahead of him. Then someone's at the door asking if he's coming to something or other. He says he'll be at least fifteen minutes. After I leave I'll be annoyed at being given such short shrift after I'd warned him explicitly in an e-mail that I wanted to discuss of a couple of specific physics topics, but for now I jump at the chance for freedom.
"Well, if you have to get going soon I could just send you an e-mail about the other stuff I wanted to talk about. Might be better if we do it that way anyhow."
Then he does the inexcusable. Everything up to now has been, in principle, ascribable to some sort of mis-communication on my part plus some unfortunate timing, but next he does the one thing that could make this worse than it already is.
"If it takes longer, it takes longer," he baldfacedly lies, shrugging and looking incongruously impatient.
No, it clearly isn't all the same to you sir, and lying to me like I'm four years old and can't read body language just so you get to feel like you're doing your job makes me want to run screaming away from you, sir. That's another knee-jerk impulse I need to get over: some part of me, against all experience, against the understanding that what he just did is more like a bodily function than deliberate jerkitude, is still shocked and angry when thrust into a double-bind. Maybe it's just that I didn't expect it in the physics department, of all places. Apparently nerds are people too.
So, OK. Have it your way.
I start talking about tensor network models in biology, but before I can get very far he cuts me off, again misconstruing where I was going with this. Normally I'm delighted when other people spare me the effort of explaining myself at length, but it only works that way when they're in the right ballpark. He's in the right municipality, at least, so fuck it -- more nodding along until I find an entry point into a related issue.
Bam, now we're on pressure solitons and I play the dirty trick: I pull out the paper I'd printed off and hand it to him as I'm explaining it to him. Now I just have to drive this train home and hop off, tell him I'll come back to talk to him about it next week or something. I'm just about to get up from my seat as I talk, when disaster strikes.
Lexical cache miss. Blue screen of verbal fluency death. Three long seconds of dead air as I stumble in the dysnomic fog, and one half-second too long: having given the abstract a cursory skimming, he shoves the paper right back under my nose while I'm stalled. My dumb hands, eager to do what they think is their job, take it automatically.
"Sounds like fun."
He might as well have patted me on the head while he was at it. It's not his fault, but I could have kicked him in the shin for that. I shake his hand, thank him and leave.
By the time I hit the courtyard 30 feet away I'm not mad, and by the time I get to my bus my ego isn't even sore. This isn't so much a measure of my resilience as it is a measure of how routinely part of my life this is: people's mixed signals fuck with my head, I roll with it and just keep going the only way I know how. My fault for walking into a psychological ambush, my fault for not being a better conversational ninja. By the time the bus starts moving I'm already mentally compiling a list of other professors into whose doorways I can stick a foot, while I let some time elapse before I try this one again.
I'm going to have to approach this one sideways, which seems to be the MO I'm usually doomed to anyhow. People would rather exercise their wisdom than spend a few minutes feeling like they don't know what's going on. Nothing new, I was just hoping it might be.
This prof isn't a dick: he's a nice, reasonable old guy who's a little overworked and was trying to be helpful in his own way. But nobody can help if they don't know what they're dealing with, and they can't know it until they see it, and they can't see it until their brain chokes on something it can't classify. OK. Lesson learned.