I cause a bit of confusion and find myself at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to most human interactions. Here’s where I go “wrong”: I say what I mean. What’s worse, I never really think to consider (despite ample experience) that people will listen to what I’ve said, make up something that they think it might have meant, and then react to that instead of what I’ve actually said. It seems to me that the world would be a much simpler place and far less filled with angst if only everyone said what he or she meant and thus the rest of us were free to just take other people’s statements at face value…but it’s not really working out for me so far, because I seem to be in the minority. And a lot of the intrigue goes right over my head.
I mention this now because not long ago, Mike mentioned in a post about how we met that he’d gotten my phone number by accident, when I sent him a picture message from my phone.
For a bit of context, around Christmas in 2008 I sent Mike a picture of the street in front of my house. We’d had a good deep snow and I decided to share because he’d been lamenting the fact that it never really seemed like Christmas in the south. That snowy picture I sent Mike was the first picture I ever emailed from my phone, and I had no idea that it would display my telephone number when it arrived. The truth is, though, that if I had known I probably wouldn’t have given it any thought. We’d been corresponding by email for months at that point, and Mike didn’t strike me as a particularly dangerous guy. And, of course, it was just my cell phone number–the same one I have posted on my Facebook profile and give out to contributors to my webzine. A little more technical knowledge would not have stopped me from clicking “send”.
He pointed out that my phone number was attached to the picture and I think my response was something like, “Oh well”. And I didn’t give it any further thought for about a year and a half. And then one day Mike wrote a blog post about the way we met, and he said that when he’d received that message, his first thought was “trap?”
I gotta tell you, I was dumbfounded. A year and a half ago Mike was suspicious of my motives when I sent him that simple photograph and I never knew it until now? Really? What else did I miss? (I don’t even dare think about what he might have been imagining when I suggested that I hop on a plane to Florida so we could go bowling together.) And Mike knows me pretty well, already did at that point–so if he’s trying to find the hidden message in my straightforward messages, what hope is there for people I’ve just met?
