Friendships are like plants. If you don't care for them, they wither and die.After reading Graham's post (if you are reading this, Graham, and object to my link, then tell me and I'll take it out!) and I guess it's partly related to my whole wanting to network thing. The thing is, I think I have a lot of friends - well, at least I've never felt like I've wanted more friends. To be perfectly honest, I wanted to be one of those people who sits alone studying in the cafeteria when I went to uni. I probably would have done a lot better in my studies if I had, but my time at university has been and gone, so I'll never know. What actually happened though, was that Graham and Running Tom introduced me to the world of "second floor" and I was quite lucky in that I made a lot of awesome friends there.
-The Sims
Unfortunately, with WoW/DotA, 340 and 440, my time spent on second floor dwindled down to maybe once every few months (Suresh usually greets me with, "Anna! I haven't seen you since last time!" - a PurePwnage quote, but still a sign of how infrequently he sees me). I feel like I haven't really kept in contact with anyone other than reading LJ posts every now and again and following them on Twitter and it's something I regret quite often.
Anyway, the point of this post wasn't to be all boo-hoo, I don't see my friends anymore (which is my own fault, and something I'll have to rectify on my own), but it has two parts. The first part is in reference to the quote above, and the second part what I think my process for "making friends" is.
Lucy recently commented that I seem to have a lot of friends, the upside of which is that I'm pretty sure I have a trivia team ready, I just need to find a good venue to go to! The downside is that friendships really do require maintenance. Sure, there are the friends that you can catch up with once a year or so, but I think in order to have close friends, frequent contact is a requirement. When I first started getting decent chunks of time off, I usually tried to plan something with friends on those days off just because I hadn't seen them in so long, and it would be nice to be able to talk for more than a few seconds as I rushed off to work. I think I overdid it a bit though, as I began to feel exhausted from so much social interaction - both at work and outside of work. Maybe I felt that way because I'm mostly introverted, but I think that if someone were to have tons and tons of friends, surely they'd either have to keep most of those friendships at the "see each other infrequently" level, or just collapse from the pressure of having to keep up with it all.
The bad part about my friendship patterns is that I seem to have phases with people in which I'll want to spend as much time as I can with them, and then after a while, I end up seeing them every few months, if that. Although, I have a few friends who I try to do things with as frequently as I can depending on our schedules, so maybe those are my "close friends". Personally, I find that I prefer more online interaction with friends than having to do stuff offline with them. For one thing, it's much cheaper that way - as I've mentioned before, most of my pay goes towards DVDs and food! One thing I like about talking to someone online is, I can talk to them in my own time, and they can respond in their own time, and we can go on doing other things in the meantime.
I find that with the #se440 people, when most of us are in the channel, conversations are more involved. I guess when we meet up for dinner or something, you have the problem of really only being able to talk to someone in close proximity as it seems rude to carry out a conversation over someone in the middle. Plus, a lot of our conversations are usually interspersed with references to funny things we've seen/read online, and it's much easier to just link said item than try to give a vague description based on what you can remember of it.
For the second part, the reason why I'm writing about this is probably because I just sat through some customer service thing at work, so excuse me if it sounds all propaganda-ish. I don't even think I'm the best person to be writing this, to be honest, as I prefer to do the whole sitting in the corner having chats with one or two people at parties thing, but here goes!
For conversation openers, I usually go with asking how they know the host/what they're studying/where they work, as they're usually safe topics of conversation. Plus, they usually tell you something else about the person that you can ask about later. I guess the most important thing with making friends (and keeping customers happy) is the ability to listen actively. If you are incredibly charming and have lots of great anecdotes, then you can probably get away with talking non-stop the entire time and still win over a group of people, but I think people who are like that are in the minority. For the rest of us, we have to have the whole two-way exchange thing.
If you listen to what someone says, and they're willing to talk, you can usually carry on a conversation quite easily just by asking them about something they said. Something I do quite often, and that I've only been caught out on once, is that if I can't find anything that I want to ask about, I'll play dumb and ask about something even though I know the answer. It doesn't always work, as they might end up giving a dry explanation, but I find that during the explanation, I can usually think of other things to ask about.
(The one time I got caught out, someone was telling me about how he was levelling a WoW character, and he acted like he was really good at it, so I started asking him about it as though I never played and restrained myself when he told me he was alliance and they're so much better than horde. A bit later, someone else came up to me and said it was so surprising to see me out and not playing WoW.)
Another thing they mentioned at work is that people love it when you remember things about them, even if it's just their name (although then you get stuck in that situation I described in my post about respawn where if you meet them and you're not sure if they remember you or not, but you don't want to be the one who brings it up). Ever since I mentioned wanting to leech knowledge from #se440 people, MrMan5.5 has been calling me a sponge because I seem to absorb all kinds of weird information. I guess it is nice when people remember things about you - there are a few regulars at work that I'm getting to know their usual betting patterns and favourite numbers, and when I see them I mention how I have/haven't been spinning their numbers and they seem to like me - although not enough to want to play at my table.
(This is the other great thing about online conversations - message logs save you the trouble of having to remember something!)
The last thing I try to do when meeting new people, is avoid talking about negative things - the kind of things that typically make someone feel sorry for you. Unless they do it first, then you can mention a similar situation in order to try and empathise. I don't know, I just find people who whine to complete strangers to be a bit irritating after a while, and I try not to be someone like that. I think it's better to get to know someone first before you start telling them about how your rent is too high and your job sucks, etc.
So that's my super guide, I wonder if it'll be a best-seller?
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