!rant

Monday morning panic...the dreaded question.

Random office colleague: "Do anything fun over the weekend?"

Me internally: Fuck...what did I do? Did I do anything at all? I mowed the yard...played video games...spent 3 hours looking at some random open source package I gave up trying to compile. All that is boring though. Was there nothing exciting I can brag about? Fuck...oh wait. I went to a huge theme park Saturday. Yeah that's cool enough to mention!

Me: "No not really"

You can say basically anything and they will respond in the same way. “I went to the forest/park/mall/museum” -> “Oh, that’s cool”

Sometimes there’s a contextual followup question, but rarely more than one; any conversation past that is a story from them, or a topic change. “I went to the forest” -> “that’s cool. Which one?” -> “oh, I’ve never been there / I was there two years ago, and saw a bear.”

The only way to change this pattern is to break expectations. “I murdered my neighbor last night.” -> “oh that’s, wait.. What? Why?” -> “he was eating my pants with soy sauce” -> “you’re crazy, Bob. … Let’s get back to sprint planning.”

Nevermind. That follows the same pattern, too.