Eye Level
2004-11-11,

There's something I had confirmed this week, something that I was told about once but never experienced first hand:

New Yorkers don't make eye contact.

They don't, that is, in the main. I can't remember who it was that told me about this originally; maybe it was on TV or something, but I don�t think so. But now I've had this phenomenon confirmed - if a one-person sample can be taken as a true stratum.

At work, the company had someone in to calibrate this big, hefty and, as of recently, problem-causing compression testing device. It was overdue for calibration and was giving us readings we knew were wrong, not to mention that no one in the place (including, by default, myself) was 100% familiar with the contraption. So in comes this guy early this week that I expected to have some sort of drawl, as the company's U.S. base is in Atlanta. Turns out, however, that he's from Long Island. Nice enough guy- about 5' 8", thin and wiry, looked Italian but had an Irish last name, and was quite hairy, even compared to me.

So we shake hands and say hi, and eventually he's asking me a few things about the situation with the machine, and I notice that he's not looking straight at me but for once in a great while. At first I thought he might have lazy eye or something, so I was trying to decide without being obvious which eye at which that I should be looking. But then I remembered about the eye contact thing. I couldn't help but feel both curious and knowledgeable at the same time, happy that I'd remembered something culturally significant for a change.

But why no eye contact? I delved into the same mental drawer in which kept this phenomenon listed, and recalled that there's two reasons for it: a) it's a safety issue, cos you never know when you're going to make eye contact with some crazy walking the streets of NYC or the area and have that be the signal for "it's killin' time"; and b) it's a privacy issue: not making eye contact makes you less aware of others, thus seemingly more physically alone, which is something to cherish in a tightly-packed megalopolis.

Makes sense to me. It amazes me the cultural differences that can arise just between states, let alone countries. It forces me to remember that there's still so much to learn. Not that I've ever felt that I know everything; far from it. But it certainly puts a clearer scope on the level of what's there to know.

-- End Transmission --