molly.com
Monday 2 February 2004
strangers when we meet
I had an experience today that has happened to me from time to time, and I’m sure it happens to others, too.
A stranger – or at least someone you are almost entirely certain you have never met in your life – walks up and starts talking to you as if they know you.
I’m really interested to hear any reader stories about this kind of experience.
Filed under: general
Posted by: site admin | 11:38 | Comments (15)
Molly: yeah, that used to happen to me there in Tucson sometimes after attending some fuctions like Pow-Wows with Grandfather. He was so well known in some circles that when we would speak to some groups of individuals together from a Cultural Anthropology P.O.V. and He from his own eighty years of living the culture. Some people would meet me later and take up conversations just a if they knew me from that mass encounter, without even an introduction on thier part, it would kinda freak me out at first. I guess some people, especially ones like yourself that are also in the music field get that all the time due to the intimacy that is imbued by interaction with an audience on a level that is taken for granted as personal and intimate almost automatically by some folks. take care. Ray
Happens to me sometimes at the Ronstadt Center downtown. Usually turns out to be missionaries from the Door.
I was on the other side of that recently. I ran into David Byrne (Talking Heads, etc.) at lunch recently — he was sitting at the next table waiting on some friends; I was eating alone — and started asking him about some articles about him in Wired and on CNN. I realized he didn’t know me, but I didn’t bother introducing myself until the conversation was almost over because I was more interested in hearing about him. I couldn’t tell if he was uncomfortable or enjoying the conversation; he was very polite, though he seemed a little distracted. Celebrities probably get that a lot; I imagine most of them deal with it differently. We only talked for a few minutes.
It happened to me when I was at waiting outside the American Consulate in Mumbai, India for getting my F1 visa. Standing besides me was a guy whom I thought was one year senior to me in my high school. We spoke for about half an hour waiting for our turn to be called for an interview with the Consulate officer. And then he siad something like “do you remember Miss Miranda, the English teacher”. We never had a Ms. Miranda teach us English. It was then that we realized we didn’t really know each other.
A month passed and I decided to take driving lessons and get an international drivers permit so that I could drive a car when I come to US. It was my third-to-the-last day of the four-week “course” and I meet the same guy – Krishna. What a coincidence. This time, however, I wasn’t sure if it was the same guy. Finally, just before my “session” ended, he asked me: hey don’t you remember me. And then I realized, this time it wasn’t a wrong number.
I had that happen one time while I was in a coffee shop one evening. This was after I grew the pony-tail (that’s an important detail) and directly after a talk I had given to a macromedia user’s group on the beauty and usefulness of Web Standards.
I guy walked up to me while I was reading the paper, and said that he really enjoyed my work, and would like to know when I would be appearing again. I figured this guy for someone who had been at the user’s group meeting – someone I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet. I explained to him that I’m no expert on the subject, that I’m just a guy who likes CSS and such, blah, blah, blah, and that this was a one-time thing.
He proceeded to launch into a speech about how great I was, and how much I’d changed his life, etc. Thirty seconds into it, I realized that he thought I was Meatloaf. I don’t know who was more embarassed.
Myself, I always get the “you remind me of someone” speech. Which makes me feel certainly less than uncommon!
As a trainer I meet hundreds of people a year. After almost seven years of that, a lot of people know me. I have a button that I wear on my backpack at all times and move to my shirt at large gatherings:
“Hi. I can’t remember your name either.”
No, but in 2002, some lawyers in Japan mistook me for a giant rubber monster and tried to sue me. ;^)
Dang, Dave, that happened to you also? Only they tried to accuse me of being Mothra because i kept trying to fly into a giant disco ball they had suspended over Tokyo.
Wow what a coincidence, Dave – someone once mistook me for a giant monster rubber and tried to use me.
and all this time i thought “condoments” were those things served with plastic food on display in the windows of resturants i visited in Asia. The idea that Godzilla might have herpes virus the size of a volkswagen never crossed my mind, yikes. the world is truly in jeopardy. talk about a weapon of masss destruction? -collective yuck- ok ok.
It happens a lot to my Mother and my Aunt. They normally both feel quite embarrased about it and pretend that they are who the person talking to them thinks they are.
When I was a kid, people always thought my mum and my aunt were the same person. Once, Mum was out and my aunt was babysitting. A guy who was doing some building work for us came round, and after 5 mins of explaining to my aunt what he’d been doing, he suddenly exclaimed,”Oh! you’re not you. You’re your sister!”
Personally, people keep mistaking me for George Clooney.
wassup people?
my name is jules. I am a middle schooler who lives in portland maine. my intrests are baseball football movies computers and biking. i am looking to get in touch with bloggers on this site. my email is jules1236@hotmail.com