PART FOUR
How to Be an Insider in Any Crowd
What Are They All Talking About?
Has it ever happened to you? Everyone at the party is speaking
gobbledygook. Theyre all discussing faulty audits, code costraints, or the
library marketand you have no idea what theyre talking about. Its because
everybody at the party is an accoutant, an architect, or a publisherand youre
not.
So you stand there with a pasty smile on your face, not opeing your
mouth. If you do, you fear the wrong thing will come out. Paranoia sets in.
Everybody will snicker at you. Youre an ousider. So you suffer in silence.
In high school I suffered a massive case of Silent Outsider Syndrome,
especially around males. All they wanted to talk about was cars. I knew
nothing about cars. The only time Id ever set foot in a body shop was to get
a suntan.
Well, one fateful day, Mama came home with a gift for me that
transformed my teenage existence from shy to sociable. It was a book on all
the current model cars and their differences over and under the hood. One
reading, and I became fluent in Fords, Chevys, and Buicks. I no longer
hyperventilated when boys said words like carburetor, alternator, camshaft,
or exhaust manifold. I
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didnt need to learn a lot, just enough to ask the right questions to get the
guys talking. When Id learned to speak car with the boys, it worked
wonders for my social life.
Cut to today. We grown-up boys and girls also have our favorite topics
that usually involve our work or our hobbies. When were with people in our
own field or who share our interests, we open up like small-town gossips.
(Even engineers who have a costant case of cat-got-their-tongue start
gabbing about greasy tubines and various projects when theyre together.) To
outsiders, our conversation sounds like gobbledygook. But we know
precisely what its about. Its our own jobbeldygook or hobbydygook.
You fear youll find yourself in a party of squash players when youre the
type of person whod rather be in court than on court? Dont panic hearing
words like lobbing and hitting rails roll off the squash players tongues. So
what if the only experience youve ever had with squash was the mashed