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genuine girls
Thursday, July 15 1999
Around noon as we the programmers (who are usually referred to as "engineers") were assembling to head out as a group to grab lunch for ourselves, Eric the Web Developer ducked back into the office to grab a couple surprise additions to our normally engineers-only contingent: a couple of genuine girls working on loan from a temp company. They were both fairly attractive big breasted girls: one with dark hair and a cute, innocent face and the other a blond with small, delicate features. Eric has tried many times to get girls to come along on our luncheon outings, but as far as I know, this was the first time he'd had any success. More importantly, both these girls were reportedly single, that is boyfriendless. To a San Diego computer programmer, a boyfriendless girl is like a 20 dollar bill blowing in the wind and elicits at least as much excitement.
For their part, these girls clearly were participating in the lunch outing as a purely social adventure. One of them had actually packed a lunch this morning and brought it along to eat with us out on the patio of our destination, the Rubios beside the Mission Valley Staples.
The lunch itself was most entertaining. I hadn't actually arrived in the car with either of the girls, but by the time I joined them at the table and introduced myself, they knew all about me, saying, "Oh, you're the one who's girlfriend is gone for the week." Evidently my colleagues had made a point of establishing my taken-ness to help the girls narrow the focus of any possible love interest to the un-taken men.
Throughout lunch, Eric, who was seated at my table with the two girls and one of the other programmers named KD, did his best to come off as conversationally charming, but he was obviously confused to some extent by the context of the situation. Normally at our lunches, we do things like complain about office politics, impossible deadlines, and arcane issues of programming. But, with the possible exception of office politics, the girls weren't going to be especially interested in any of that subject matter. Since our fallback conversation is sexist talking about chicks, we were in something of a bind. Following my example, Eric resorted to the sort of talk that makes most people uncomfortable. This method of conversation maintenance actually works amazingly well if it's done with subtlety and grace, in the same way that all good books are just a little shocking, but I noticed that Eric was making the error of failing to pick up on the girls' non-verbal clues. For a while there it seemed that both he and KD were verging on thoroughly grossing the girls out with a bungled conversation about all the uses men can make of tampons.
Then there was the issue of Eric's incredible pride in his accomplishments, a pride that can be truly oppressive to the uninitiated. Before you realize that Eric gushes this way about everyone's accomplishments, it's easy to focus on just the part where he's gushing about his own, and he comes off as terribly conceited, and this is never a good thing when you're trying to pick up the ladies. Again, this was mostly an issue of Eric's failing to detect subtle (and not-so-subtle) non-verbal clues. When the girls start, for example, to shoot each other sidelong glances, it's usually a good idea to reassess the line of conversation and perhaps elegantly switch it to another topic. In this particular case, I think self-deprecating humour could have been used very effectively; I personally have found it to be a great perfume to cover the stench of my conceit.
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