Today one of my worst nightmares kind of materialised - that of entering a room full of black ties and snotty strangers and having to interact with them as though I was the most social person in the world. Only I can know how awkward I felt as I tried so hard to hide it from my face and posture… Body language says a lot, you see, and it can betray your best endeavours.

After shaking hands a few times with people whose names I couldn’t even register in my head, I wondered about the meaning of hand shakes. Surely knowledgeable people could tell from a mere hand shake something about you that you’d rather they didn’t know about. Perhaps there were subtle messages being passed on through the mere strength of fingers squeezing around another person’s palm, or even meaning in the length of time it took to part from that other person’s hand? I couldn’t say, but my thoughts lingered on that point for a little while - and then I made a mental note to google it at some point.

For better or for worse, I noticed that my hand shake was on the strong side, with a lingering hint to it. A more ‘feeling’ type, I suppose. My thinking is that since I’m being made to shake someone else’s hand, I might as well mean it. I do remember shaking ‘limp’ hands, though… the kind that feels like a dead fish in yours, and it always translated into a feeling that the person in question was a prick thinking themselves somewhat superior and ‘having’ to shake yours. I’d tend to squeeze that sort of hand even harder, just to get the message across that I piss on their deluded sense of superiority.

It’s getting so late now, and it’s a Tuesday night. It means that tomorrow is business as usual, having to wake up like all the other drones out there. Some of them are only pretending, or maybe they are part of the fish caught in the net that can’t find a way out. To the machine, however, these distinctions never matter. The machine itself (the workings of the world which allow it to flow in the patterns we can experience and live in) only care about results, not the detail. So it matters not in effect whether one is caught up against their will, or if they are in there willingly, because the end result is the same: we all end up allowing the machine to carry on existing and working like clockwork.

I hate networking with people. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was merely expected to say ‘hi bob, what’s up’, but there’s nothing more awkward than standing in the middle of a crowded room and suddenly falling silent with nothing to say, and the other person remains silent too. Ideally, you want to end up with the opposite sort of temperament that is able to talk non-stop regardless of the situation. That would usually be the forte of ‘communications’ people. Until you realise that these people are pretty useless at giving you the sort of information you need other than empty chit-chat.

After another half hour spent struggling to look like I was networking with people, I picked up on a trick that consisted in at least managing to strike up a conversation with one person, and listening to whatever they were saying about the business (which I still know very little about), and later on, when I met another person, I would start talking about the topic spoken about by the previous person as if it came from me. That way it not only gave me something to say, but it made me look like I knew more than I actually did.

Pretence, pretence, pretence.

I still find myself ‘running away’ from the office a few times a day to draw in some fresh air, and my eyes invariably look up at the sky as soon as I emerge from the building. In a daze, I wonder what the hell I’m doing, and I realise I have no clue. It leads me to wonder whether I’m the only one feeling that way, but I guess I can’t be. But then I wonder how many out of the masses of clueless people out there actually stop to wonder about their own clueless ways, and I think the number of people there is quite low.