Today I had one of my less good experiences at the university. I went to lunch with a bunch of guys from a different department that I don't see very often, but who I like to hang out with. I went to sit down next to them but as soon as I sat down I heard a loud 'oh no'. Another guy on the way over to the table looked at me and the first guy who was walking towards me from another side repeated himself: 'oh, that wasn't very good!'. I asked if I was not supposed to sit there and they said (still not very apologetic) 'well, we have sort of a lunch meeting'. Now other people had joined and everyone seemed totally lost because I had sat down across from this guy that they wanted to meet with. The guy next to me, on the other hand, was not participating in the meeting and he was one of the guys I had planned lunch with. I said to the 'oh no' guy in a sarcastic tone that I wouldn't mind participating in their meeting as well, with no meetings this week I suffered meeting withdrawal symptoms.
Since I wasn't about to move (that would have left me with an option of going to another table and sit by myself) they ended up moving the (one single) guy across from me to another table and held their meeting there. I could then keep sitting among the 4 people group that I had planned to have lunch with. The whole 30 second experience left me with a weird taste in my mouth and a sense of not feeling very welcome in any of the crowds.
One thing is good communication skills and blurting out 'oh no' probably belong in the 'not so good'-communication skills department. This absence could be explained by the Danish language's lack of the words 'excuse me' and when an action is encountered as a surprise, those words ('oh no') are often the only ones Danes can come up with. It is apparently not customary to consider any of the listeners' possible perception of the outburst.
Another thing is the standard social behavior that is to be carried out in sensitive situations such as lunch. I might be naive in thinking that it is plain rude to indicate that a person is not welcome to sit at a seat of his/her choice; it might only be rude to actually kick someone away from an already taken seat. In my world, however, any standard social behavior includes making people feel welcome in a crowd, unless that person clearly does not belong there. Examples of this include students at a faculty lunch, strangers joining a table of lively conversation and research assistants at an executive meeting. Most other situations than these require a bit of good manners and sense of the situation; it is not a common social standard to make people clearly aware that they are not welcome.
I might be too hard to judge people's lack of social and communication skills on the basis of such small experience. Many people, especially here in Denmark, are very straight forward and I have to admit that because of this 'fast-lane-communication' I was not deeply hurt. I was merely puzzled as to if this is standard behavior of two hyper active guys, who were focused on one thing: getting their meeting over with, or, if this is just standard behavior from guys with low social skills. In the end I guess it doesn't matter that much as long as I don't let it get to me and I don't think there is a great chance of this, I am too aware that not all people have the same sense of social conduct as I have (and by that I don't mean better or worse but simply that what some people consider proper conduct is not necessarily what I consider proper conduct).
Posted by Louise at July 13, 2004 03:37 PM