Encounters With Strange People

Today at work I walked past this girl that I see ALL THE TIME. But for some reason, we always give each other the awkward lookaway in the halls. This isn’t the case with most other people who work on my floor. I have no problem saying hello to relative strangers or people that seem nice. This is why I couldn’t understand why saying hello to this person became so impossible; she seems perfectly normal.

But then I realized a pattern: the people I felt comfortable acknowledging in the halls were the ones I acknowledged early on in our brief and utterly superficial relationships. Thus, there must exist a cutoff, a certain number of blowoffs, beyond which one can never say hi to a stranger…

But seriously, I think after four or five mutual lookaways, it just becomes weird if you randomly surprise them time with a, “Hey!”