Author: Joan

Click quotient

I had forgotten what it was like to click with someone on the first meeting. I mean really click. Going beyond ‘Oh, she seems really nice. It’d be good to meet again.’ I mean the kind of rapport when you could sit and talk for hours, even if you can’t remember her name because when she first introduced herself, you didn’t pay special attention because you didn’t know you would click.

I haven’t clicked with someone new for maybe a year or two. However, on Friday I met two people that I found so likeable that I had to eventually force myself away to mingle elsewhere in order to stay within the normal bounds of first time friendliness.

I didn’t want to scare them away, although probably they liked me too and were also trying to calculate the right time to move on. I suspect that clicking has to be mutual.

The first person I clicked with on Friday is an older woman who leads the maritime business for a rival consultancy. She was sitting next to me at a gala lunch. We didn’t talk about anything in particular: work, business ethics, accounting systems, our old teachers. It just seemed that we always had something to say. We swapped business cards and I hope I can see her again some time.

The second person I clicked with is a man about my age who used to work at my company, but now works for another rival. I had just arrived at a house warming party and warned him about a giant bug crawling on his shirt. We also got talking about everything and nothing. I don’t think I’ll see him again unless our mutual friends organise another gathering.

It leads me to think about what my click quotient is. I will define this as the proportion of new people I meet with whom I click. I wonder if people have similar click quotients?

Originally, I was thinking that people have different click quotients depending on how open their personalities are. That is, the more easy going, receptive and chatty you are, the more chance you will click with a stranger.

But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe for those people who perceive that they click with many people are in fact just meeting a lot more people because they are:

  • in a new situation, such as a new job, course or city, and there are lots of people to meet; and/or
  • extroverted and comfortable chatting to strangers, and so in any particular room of people, will meet more of them.

So what I mean is maybe the there is a general trend for people to genuinely click with, say, 10% of people they meet. The people we see who seem to have a rapport with many people are simply clicking with 10% of a larger number.

But perhaps the opposite is also true. Maybe when you click with lots of people, you don’t think it’s all that special. Certainly for me, having not clicked with anyone new for so long, it felt a bit wondrous to do so on Friday.

Another factor is probably also the crowd that you’re moving with. If you mingle with people who have the same interests and background as you, then that might increase the click success rate.

I wonder what the smallest length of time is that you need to speak to someone before you click?

I wonder if clicking really must be mutual? (otherwise the result could be stalking or uncomfortable distancing)

I wonder if some people with a lower click quotient experience more profound/deeper clicking when it happens?

I wonder if you don’t click with someone straight away, you can develop the same rapport over time? If this happens, is it something new that has developed or is it the discovery of something that was always there?

Birthday spider

My habit is to take a low key approach to celebrating my birthday. I assume that people aren’t really interested.

That’s why I was surprised and really touched a few weeks ago when my team mates at work presented me with a birthday card signed by all and a massive cupcake.

Birthday spider cupcake

Another pleasant surprise was the natural banana flavour of the icing, despite its artificial, almost glowing, yellowness.

Detecting leaks

Today, I took my bike out for the first time in two months. Despite the interval, I could still more or less expertly unfold it and launch onto the road.

However, I was terribly wobbly. I almost immediately veered into the queue cars and vans parked along the street. How could my riding have become so rusty in two months?

I hopped off the bike and lifted it to the curb. Ten seconds inspection revealed the problem. The front tyre was flat.

I wheeled my bike to the second-hand bike store where I had bought my lock and lights. A man with a Canadian accent and two centimetres of cigarette butt in his hand helped me attach the bike pump to the wheel nozzle thing.

‘Have you got a puncture?’ he said. ‘It’s really flat.’

‘I haven’t ridden it in a while,’ I said hopefully. I hoped it wasn’t a flat. I don’t know how to fix those yet (Damjan did buy me a book, I’m sure I can look it up).

‘How can you tell?’ I asked. ‘If there’s a puncture, I mean.’ For some reason, I had a mental image of putting the tyre in a bath tub of water. It just flashed into my mind and I didn’t have time to figure out what it meant.

He said, ‘If it’s flat again tomorrow, then you’ve got a puncture.’

I took this to mean that it’d be fine for me to ride today, and so I continued on my planned 20 km ride along Regent’s Canal and Victoria Park.

It was cloudy but dry, a good day for cycling except it became chilly by late afternoon. Also, my helmet was probably on too tight so my head hurt.

The expedition ended two hours later, with front tyre still firm. I felt proud. This was the first independent longish bike ride I’ve done on my new bike.

Tomorrow, I will squeeze the front tyre to see if it’s lost much air. In the mean time, I’ve been pondering the strange mental bath tub image. I now know what it means.

As kids, Jason and I had a number of blow up vinyl toys (didn’t everyone?). For example, we had blow up baseball bats, which we used to swat each other.

Once a few rounds of swatting had occurred, these inflatables would eventually start losing air. I remember dad taking various inflatable toys to the bathroom, putting them in a full bath tub of water, and squeezing them. We then followed the stream of bubbles back to the indistinguishable location of the leak.

The inflatable was then dried and patched with sticky tape. And thus, it lived to fight another day.

The dog’s world is a flat

The family living in the flat next to ours have a large white fluffy dog. While I washed my breakfast dishes, I watched the boy play with the dog in the concrete square at the centre of our block of flats.

The dog looked frustrated. It was darting here and there but no more than two metres at a time because the boy was holding tightly onto its leash. I guess the boy had no option, as there is no gate to our concrete square. An unleashed dog could have run away to the wild open streets of London.

I remember seeing the boy play with the dog a few month ago. He threw a stick. The dog stood beside him, apparently confused. Only when the boy faked a sprint towards the stick, did the dog start running towards it. The dog skidded and made three attempts at picking up the stick before success.

This incident made me realise that the dog, though large, is actually quite young. A big puppy.

I also didn’t know that dogs aren’t born with the instinct to fetch.

In the first three months of the dog coming to live amongst our flats, he barked and barked. The family would frantically shush him. Soon, they too were barking. I couldn’t walk past their front door without setting off a canine and human symphony.

I think the dog has learned. I can now walk by and two-thirds of the time, the dog would watch without a peep.

Some mornings on the way to work, I see the family out for a walk with the dog. I hope they go out every day, even twice a day. It must be hard for a big dog living in a two-storey London flat.

A familiar giddy feeling

Deliberately, I brought the yoghurt foil lid came closer to my face. Then I licked it and a highway of silver appeared through the creamy yellowness.

I giggled then glanced around to see if any of my colleagues had heard. I was filled with a familiar giddiness. When was the last time I had licked a yoghurt lid? I felt like a kid again.

Motherland

This week, I came back from two weeks in Hong Kong and China. My parents flew up from Melbourne to meet me for my first visit to the motherland.

We spent a week in the Sichuan province of China, visiting three of the six UNESCO world heritage sites in the province. One day, I will visit Beijing and Shanghai but on this trip, I saw China’s beautiful natural side.

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Pearl Shoal Waterfall at Jiuzhaigou Valley.

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A lake at Jiuzhaigou Valley. These lakes are amazing — they are crystal clear, even when the water is deep.

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Tibetan flags at Juizhaigou Valley. About 1000 people live in the valley and most are Tibetan.

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I paid 10 RMB (AUD1.70, £0.90) to dress up in traditional Tibetan dress.

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Red panda at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. I used to think that red pandas were the plain cousin of black-and-white pandas. Now that I’ve seen them in person, I can assure you that they are very cute as well.

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Pandas fighting — they don’t do kung fu, it’s more like basic whacking and thumping.

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‘Get off me, you bully!’

We also saw baby pandas (one and three month old). The three month old panda was so cute, like a yawning flailing stuffed toy. The one month old panda was also cute, like a furry worm. We couldn’t take photos in the panda nursery.

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At the sacred Buddhist mountain, Mount E’mei.

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Incence at Mount E’mei.

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China is full of bad English translations. I don’t know why. Even at our four and five star hotels and at UNESCO sites, it is clear that no one has employed the services of a fluent English speaker. I think this sign should say something like: ‘Value your life. Please do not climb over.’

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Jinli Street in Chengdu has been an important market street for more than 2200 years. It was renovated a few years ago and is truly beautiful, everything stereotypically Chinese — except the prices, which have the stereotypical tourist premium. It is also uncharacteristically shiny and clean. Tourists flock here and are fleeced by pickpockets.

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Puppets on Jinli Street.

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At the end of Jinli Street, we watched Sichuan opera. This included the famous magic mask act, where the performers make lightning fast mask changes. The mask master was shaking my hand when he twitched and was suddenly wearing a different mask. I was astonished. I didn’t see it happen and he had been right in front of me.

Summer holidays

I’ve been in Serbia for the past 10 days.

1395Looking out from Kalemedgan, the ancient fortress of Belgrade.

1388Cruising the Sava River, one of two rivers running through Belgrade. The other is the famous Danube River.

1392I ate ice cream five times. Serbian summers are hot.

1398Cathedral of St Sava, patron saint of the Serbian Orthodox church. This church has been in construction for a hundred years and it’s in the final decade for completion.

I flew back and got home at 6pm. Tomorrow morning, I am flying out to Hong Kong for work, then China for fun. I’ll be back in two weeks.

Dream run home

A couple of times a month, I take the coach to Oxford. London-door-to-Oxford-door, taking the coach takes around two hours.

Travelling back to London one weekend, I had a dream run home. The coach trip went smoothly, arriving at Baker Street London in 75 minutes.

Within a minute of waiting at the Baker Street bus stop, my local bus arrived. The local bus carried me all the way to my home bus stop without stopping once. This is very unusual as this is well-patronised bus route.

Then as I walked home from the bus stop, every pedestrian crossing flashed green for ‘walk’.

With such a series of good fortune, I was home in less than 90 minutes.

Bike tube

When Tube workers went on strike in June, I was completely unaffected. Once again, I rejoiced in my living arrangements, particularly the 20 minute walk between home and work.

There was one aspect of the strike that did cause a twinge of envy. The London Cycling Campaign ran ‘BikeTubes’ over the two strike days. Experienced and novice cyclists joined together to travel en masse along designated routes, thus forming the cycling equivalent of a tube line.

I live too close to work for any of the BikeTube routes to be useful, which is a shame because I really enjoyed the one crowd cycling event I’ve been on.

The BikeTubes were so successful that they are now a permanent fixture on Transport for London‘s calendar. Cycle Fridays allow new cyclists to experiment with riding into work in the safe company of trained marshals from the London Cycling Campaign.

Last Friday as I waited to cross the road to get to work, I saw a BikeTube of people go past me. It looked fun.

Goodbye, cheerio

I have been signing off my emails with ‘cheerio’ since long before I arrived in the UK. According to my email archive, I first used ‘cheerio’ on 18 May 2003. I use it to sign off personal email, and at work with people I’ve met or talked to more than a couple of times.

I can’t remember why I started using it. I like ‘cheerio’ a lot. It sounds friendly — a bit cute, a bit cheerful. I imagine myself doing a little wave, as I hit ‘send’.

Two weekends ago, I read an article that said that the email sign off ‘cheers’ is too casual.

Then ‘cheerio’ must be even more so. I’ve always supposed some people think it’s overly cute but I never worried about it until now. (The article also said that ‘cheers’ is faux British, which is a criticism we here can ignore.)

So I started thinking about other email closing options. While I like the balance of formality and friendliness in ‘best’, I can’t use it because I have a thing about grammar. Closing with an adjective is just a bit strange to me.

I use ‘best regards’ for my professional correspondence. It is too formal to replace ‘cheerio’. By that same token, ‘sincerely’, ‘kind regards’, ‘faithfully’ and ‘cordially’ are similarly discounted.

‘Yours’ and ‘warmly’ is too intimate.

No sign off is sometimes too abrupt.

Perhaps my correspondents haven’t noticed, but I haven’t used ‘cheerio’ since 10 August, except for a single slip up on the 17th.

Instead I’ve been rotating, as appropriate, the following pool of closing salutations:

  • Nothing — good for short emails as part of a longer discussion
  • ‘Thanks’ and ‘thanks again’ — always works for emails in which you ask for a favour
  • ‘Hope that helps’ — responding to other people’s emails that end in ‘thanks’.
  • ‘See you soon’, ‘talk soon’ — especially when you’re arranging a meeting or follow up call
  • ‘Hope the rest of your day is less frantic’ — or some other set of well wishes that reflect a person’s current state
  • ‘Hope you’re well’ — good for people you haven’t been in contact with for a while
  • ‘Bye’ — this is, of course, quirky because it is so classic so I use it only occasionally

So many options, which were once swept up in the single phrase of ‘cheerio’!

What it means is that I have to spend more time thinking now when I close my email.