This little blue foam Starfighter was created by Ron Fikes. It flies great!

I walk into a room.

A guy I know asks me about something he read about on the Internet.

Two guys I don’t know stand around, listening.

I tell the guy I know what I’ve read about it. I tell him what I think about what I’ve read. I talk for maybe a minute or two.

When I finish, one of the guys I don’t know asks me if I’ve experienced the event that I read about.

I say no.

“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

A Different View. It turns out that he has encountered the situation I was describing, and his experience was different from what I read.

OK.

This kind of reminds me of when I was 18, almost 49 years ago, waiting on customers at the food counter of an amusement park grill. It’s summer, a warm day.

A child asks his mother why there are bubbles on the side of his glass of water.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe they got stuck there when he poured the water.”

“Actually, ” I explain, “warm water can’t hold as much dissolved gas as cold water, so as the glass warms up, gas bubbles out of the water.”

“You must be a college student,” she says, coolly.

She was the explainer. I was the jerk behind the counter.

Recurring Impulse. Back to the room I walk into at the beginning of the story, here I am trying to be the explainer again.

Thinking about the encounter, I decide the following:

• I should pause a beat before I become an explainer. Asking why I was being asked would have helped me out here.
• I should carefully examine my audience, looking for curled lips and narrowed eyes.

Non-Stop Talkers. One of the things that bothers me when I’m flying is people who won’t stop talking.

We have a few people at Baylands who are capable of extended soliloquies on arcane subjects.

I once accidentally shorted the terminals on a battery I was fiddling with while one of these guys was explaining why he’d chosen a particular airfoil for the wing on his new glider.

In the process of saying, “Uh huh” every 30 seconds during the twists and turns of this academic lecture, I subdivided my attention too far.

Despite my impulse to blog, I’m not a serial monologist. I’m a bursty talker, bubbling with brief enthusiasms.

And I don’t enjoy becoming an explainer.

A Bit of Research. When I get home from this interaction, I look up the abrasive stranger on the Internet.

I find some postings from him on various discussion boards, including one in a thread on this very same topic.

He writes in a lucid manner. He’s well informed. He’s not a flamer or a troll.

So, I decide, he’s a credible witness. With rough-hewn social skills.

Oops. Guess I’m explaining again.

Tags: Airplanes, Flying, People.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Elsewhere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.