Research on the benefits of “weak ties” – connecting with casual acquaintances
hbr.org
hbr.org
Sometimes I meet these people once and never see them again, sometimes i'll see them regularly for a while but then they vanish and I never see them again or in those odd cases they end up becoming friends.
The article touched on it a bit, but it has been hard not being able to talk to random people lately with this lockdown and all. It's amazing the kind of people you can just meet randomly in your day.
I've been trying to do this myself for a while, and now it almost comes natural? Even just a "hey there!" or "hello!" gets a nice response. Sometimes you end up chatting, often not, but oh well... At least it's not just ignoring each other in silence, eh?
One small tidbit that might be fun to share was when I met a seemingly shy woman and we started a conversation and eventually I asked.
What do you do?
I program traffic lights.
What language are they programmed in?
In C
Who knew? :D
My perspective:
This comment does not seem to break HN guidelines. Here is the contribution of the comment:
- Assuming that making smalltalk to strangers is a good thing (parent's showcase), then what's more important is doing it. It doesn't matter how you're inspired to do it.
- Perhaps read the Luck Factor
- Traffic lights are programmed in C (in my part of the world)
If the downvote comes from that it doesn't add enough. Fair enough. If it's rather something else (tone, some form of negative emotion, civility or anything like that), I'd be curious to know how it affects people.
If no one gives feedback after me asking explicitly, I get it.
I've often wondered by sometimes perfectly reasonable comments are downloaded, and I suspect it's 1) because people just don't like the commenter because of other comments, 2) mis-clicks, 3) bots that randomly vote to appear like real users.
FWIW, I upvoted your original comment and downvoted this one because of 2.
Every social website suffers from it.
TBH, I would like to hear it from someone who does it, because I don't think my explanation quite covers it...
I, for example, never downvote unless it's obviously completely wrong or extremely offensive (and intended to be so).
I am changing. I talk weather with the next person in line regardless of their culture (if they're receptive). Make eye contact with everyone. Smile and nod even if there's no time to talk. Notice people's kids and make faces at babies.
So far, very good responses. Some new friends, the proprietor of the diner I frequent, the waitstaff there, some distant neighbors who frequent my gas station. Random senior woman who was looking at the hole where the old dance hall used to be (construction downtown). Craig, the homeless guy who lives under a bridge and asks for change on the mall. He has told me some very interesting stories about life on the road!
Some folks are stunned when I 'see' them. People from different cultures are accustomed to being invisible. I try to be respectful of this too, brief comment, the weather, wish them a good day.
"regardless of their culture" -> that's othering. you could substitute "regarless of our cultural differences" and be less confrontational in that regard.
"Some folks are stunned when I 'see' them. People from different cultures are accustomed to being invisible." -> why you, and again, why is it your culture vs. theirs? why would they be invisible and not you? culture is shared, and the effects of your (new) actions is to create that shared culture. perceiving 'other' cultures this way is antagonistic. other people feel that, even if they are otherwise polite and welcoming.
And yes folks from other countries recently arrived are correctly described as having 'a different culture'. Else the word 'culture' loses all meaning.
I'm sympathetic to efforts to diminish 'them' vs 'us. But the topic here is exactly that, and its appropriate to call it out.
you may also want to ask a bunch of immigrants and "others" about whether they feel invisible before projecting.
our brains are biased toward remembering the unique, not the common. that's why people focus on differences incessantly, not commonalities. white men are ~1/3 of the US population.
I'm not opposed to anything you say. But the conversation can't be had without saying this stuff out loud. And hindering conversation is an order of magnitude larger problem, than pedantry about terminology.
here are my observations living in a diverse neighborhood: white folks, black folks, east asians, mexicans, central americans, south asians, pacific islanders, etc. the black folks observably feel hyper-scrutinized. east/south asians tend to be reserved. mexicans and central americans are congenial, though sometimes guarded because of language/immigration issues. in nearly all cases i can think of, no one feels invisible, but rather visibly, palpably different, like a spotlight is shining on them everywhere they go. they're sometimes nervous because they're trying so hard to fit in, not because they feel invisible.
I have the same experience (age? ;-) and actually organized many events in the past years for random people to meet in person. Because of the virus that had to stop, so then I started building a platform to do the same online.
I do not have a website yet for the platform, but this is the next event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/104238227344.
I would appreciate your feedback on this.
Association of Religious Service Attendance With Mortality Among Women https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
So the customer might feel better, but what about the barista? I think that a lot of customer-service personnel want to remain as much in their own headspace as possible while they are forced to stand there dealing with strangers just to pay their bills, and so this behaviour would be imposing on them. Also, for female baristas, customers flirting with them are one of their biggest complaints, and it is all too easy for any social interaction to be misinterpreted as flirting. So, unless you have observed the barista before to see that they genuinely like interacting with customers, I think one only risks being rude by making eye contact and trying to exchange some small conversation outside of simply conveying one’s order.
Contrary to whatever business model motivated that comment, the entire point of the business is to encourage customers to return. Its not the private living room of the barrista where they share their weekend with the counter staff while ignoring the line, the tables needing bussing, the overflowing trash.
The personnel are to attend to the business 100% of the time they are being paid to do so. That includes chatting up the customers, deflecting flirting, asking about preferences and generally making the customer feel at home.
Don't like all that? Get a job hauling trash or digging ditches.
But be honest, we've all been to the shop where the staff seems to think they're in their own kitchen, chatting up their mates and whoa! somebody wants me to sell them a coffee??
I grew up on a farm. We worked. It wasn't intended to be entertaining, or self-fulfilling, or respectful of the personal choices of the worker. It was pitching hay, spreading manure.
The idea that kind of work is 'wrong' and workers are supposed instead to be supported in a congenial frame of mind with their personal space respected and only kind, polite people to interact with, is a pretty hipster notion. You take the money, you better deliver the performance required.
If you want a robot, go out and build a robot. But don't be surprised when your customers go somewhere else a little bit more welcoming.
Pretty soft life, that, if you can get it. But there're lots of jobs require you to sweat, mentally or physically. Nothing wrong with that. People can survive a shift, without total mental breakdown.
I'm generally supportive of so-called 'Millennials' because people are people, the young are not the soft fragile children people like to make them out to be.
Then somebody posts something like that comment, and I can see how the stereotype got made.
Work to live, not live to work. We all end up in the dirt either way.
If there's any mental health issue, it stems from the cognitive dissonance of believing a counter job should be like chatting with your friends and hanging out with cool people. Instead of dealing with a sometimes-difficult public for the purpose of moving coffee (or whatever). Understand what you're doing, and doing it right, can be very satisfying.
HN is an anomaly in my experience; people outside the tech world mostly hate their jobs and put in juuuust enough effort to not get fired.
Millennials (and younger) have largely abandoned capitalism. The only way to win a game that's stacked against you is to not play. Shit's gonna get real weird in the next couple decades.
Make all the meta-argument you like (Capitalism! Stacked!) That's substantially moving the goalposts. Feel free to have that conversation, but its a big left-turn from where we started here.
Ok, so dehumanizing is the polite thing to do. Got it.
In seriousness, that is a customer facing profession, and you don't need to enjoy people, but you sure do need to be able to act like you do. And most people would consider a warm, personal interaction the ideal. If it makes a barista uncomfortable, it's probably more likely because it highlights how rude every other customer is.
I can only speak to my own experiences in food service, but if everyone thought this way, it would make for a very dull shift imo. quick conversations with customers really helped pass the time for me. particularly entertaining customers would often find extra food in their bag ;)
keep in mind there's a lot of low-wage work out there. some people are desperate and have to take the first position they can get, but a lot of people in directly customer facing roles have chosen that for a reason. they probably could have worked in the kitchen or restocked shelves in a grocery store if they really didn't want to talk to people.
timing and context is important of course. if the line behind you is twenty people deep, it's a bad time to chat. if the place is empty and the person is doing low-priority busywork, they might love to shoot the shit for a few minutes.
> Also, for female baristas, customers flirting with them are one of their biggest complaints, and it is all too easy for any social interaction to be misinterpreted as flirting.
first half of this is true, but you're taking it to a bit of an extreme. flirting with someone who's paid to be nice to you is almost always a bad idea, but an innocent conversation is no big deal.
The key here is recognizing that this is what I like to call a "low-stakes friendship" -- it's closer to the kind of relationship you'd have with a co-worker or a client versus a friend. If you have healthy boundaries, you wouldn't pry too much into a co-worker's life. I'd even say it might be ok to politely ask out a barista you're friendly with on a date, but if they say no drop it and don't ask again.
I can still remember wonderful conversations I had with strangers decades ago, and with casual acquaintances I've revived over the past couple of years. Highly recommend.
I would say this repeating class was highly positive for me, and way more impactful than grades ever were in the long term.
After that I went MIA, the thing is when you know so many people - a lot of people try to extract value from you. I never needed help of any of these people in my life, I am usually self driven and the way I get people interested in what I want their help in is through showing them money and them analysing if is worth their time.
Beyond that I've stopped trading favours and now everything is transactional for me.
That's life, I can't blame them, but it really starts to hurt the more it happens. I find myself more cautious and conservative about who I invest time with now. Having everything be so transactional seems like institutionalized sociopathy sometimes.