We are waiting outside the conference room for the previous group to vacate. The Program manager from the customer's side walks towards us. He smiles, he waves at everyone. I say 'Hello', but he is not looking at me ! Must have missed me, I think to myself.
We are in the meeting room and status of different projects is discussed. I sit right opposite this man. As is normal, when he talks I am looking at him. He looks around, at each person in the room. He looks to the person on my left, to the one on my right, even at the person behind me ! But I wonder why I am being ignored !
What is happening ? Couple of justifications spring to my mind:
a. I have lost weight completely ! I have become so unimaginably thin, that people cannot see me easily !! As Wodehouse says I have become all length and no breadth. This reason seems too implausible even to me ! (Alas, there are mirrors in the restroom and not all of them lie !!)
b. I am having some sort of psychic experience, where it is my soul lurking in the conference room and my physical body is still in my seat browsing and refreshing the blog site ! Although this seems more likely, others in the room talk to me as if my physical body were there too ! So, wrong guess again !!
c. This guy probably has a secret crush on me and is afraid that he will start stuttering if he meets my eyes !! All Indian romantic movies that we have seen, tell us that the hero stammers when he meets the eye of the heroine. But something in me tells me not to flatter myself too much !! I mean, ok I am good looking (there goes my humility again !!), but not so much that it can leave people speechless !!
Come on, who am I kidding. This is not the first time this is happening and this guy is just a jerk with a super-bloated ego, who thinks he is too far above me to speak to me.
Wow, that felt so nice and liberating!! I am feeling better already !!
I remember an instance in school, where we were staging a mock-parliament for a competition. All through the rehearsals, there was one senior guy who would refuse to look at me in the eye while talking to me. I was annoyed and decided to hit back by staring at him non-stop when he was playing his part. Poor chap would stutter and stammer on feeling a pair of eyes boring into him.
Sadly, the guy here is the customer and I am in his territory! There is nothing I can do except pretend to take such things in my stride and get on with my work - probably crib about it in a blog post or try and refuse to meet his eye in the next meeting (thing is, such people will not even notice that, because they are anyway not looking at you !), but nothing else.
I wish we can switch places, and I become a king/queen i.e., a customer, so that he can try really hard to catch my eye and I can refuse to look at him. Till then, let me imagine some sequences where he is at my mercy and I avenge myself and treat him like the scum he is !!
Don't you just hate people who don't make eye-contact when they talk ?
No comments:
Post a Comment