On the way back from the Gallery just now, Owen, bjh21 and I encountered a cat in the road, and a couple of concerned passers-by said it had been run over and was injured. Since this was about two houses away from Relativity, Owen stood guard to make sure the cat didn't get run over again while I went to Relativity to phone the RSPCA. Sadly what the RSPCA advertise as an emergency phone number in fact kept me on hold for ten minutes while persistently repeating a recorded FAQ about baby birds, and then Owen showed up and said the cat had at least displayed enough mobility to get itself off the road and out of immediate danger, so I left a message on the Blue Cross answerphone instead and we decided we'd done all we could do.

I'm sure it's terribly interesting to know that baby birds tend to spend a couple of days floundering around on the ground immediately after leaving the nest because they haven't quite got the hang of flying yet, to be reassured that this is perfectly normal and the mother bird is typically not far off while it's going on, and that the RSPCA can't help because they are unable to teach baby birds the life skills required for their long-term survival, but I'm unconvinced that I needed to hear it four times instead of, for example, hearing something I didn't already know.

When I rule the world I will make a law about keeping people on hold, and that law will make it mandatory to give statistics to help the caller judge how much longer they will be on hold. Current average rate of call handling, number of calls ahead of you in the queue, that sort of thing. Because I have a suspicion that in fact my call wasn't in a queue just now; I suspect there might have been nobody around to take my call, and the automated queuing system hadn't bothered to signal this to me in any useful way. If I'd heard ‘There are currently zero people ahead of you. The last call was answered at six p.m.’ or some such, it would have been clear to me instantly that I was wasting my time.

So, Saturday night was lark_ascending's birthday party, so I trundled along and attempted to have fun.

With very little success, though. For an unpleasantly large fraction of the evening it seemed that all the people I most wanted to spend time with were already preoccupied with talking to one another, often about things that didn't interest me; so I spent a lot of the party staring into space, moping, or making a token effort to seem like part of a conversation so as not to be obviously mopey.

The way I describe that, it sounds as if it's just one of those things, just bad luck; statistically that sort of thing must happen to everyone at parties once in a while and it just so happened that it was my turn last night. But on the other hand, that just-bad-luck argument seems to be the excuse I've used the last three or four times I failed to enjoy myself at parties, so I wonder if it's worth looking deeper for reasons why it might happen to me more often than to other people.

I think part of it is that I'm not very conversationally assertive. I can remember this as far back as childhood; it often seemed to me that I'd be saying something at the dinner table, my sister or my dad would interrupt and start their own conversation, and when I protested Mum would say something along the lines of ‘that's just the way conversation naturally goes, it's rude to make a fuss about it’. Yet when I tried to do the same thing, it would be more like ‘shush, it's rude to interrupt’. (Even more unjustly, I recall occasionally being ticked off for interrupting when what I was actually doing was protesting about having just been interrupted!) In retrospect I'm sure this was actually my biased childish viewpoint either selectively noticing only the times where it went against me, or failing to spot some vital distinction between the specific cases, or both; but it seemed to me after a while that I'd better get used to what I wanted to talk about being less important than what other people wanted to talk about, no matter whether they were older and wiser than me or younger and more enthusiastic, no matter whether I was in the middle of saying something or was trying to interrupt them.

Now I am older and wiser, or at any rate older, and I can now look back on that and see it as an unfortunate childhood experience which doesn't actually mean I'm worthless or boring or stupid or in any other way intrinsically deserving of having a smaller part in conversations than other people. But unfortunately, the habits seem to have persisted; when other people are talking about something I find tedious, I'm very reluctant to attempt to change the topic to something I'm more interested in, and yet when I'm talking about something interesting with people, I'm just as reluctant to resist when someone else changes the topic on me.

Another thing I notice is that when there's a group of people I like having a conversation, my instinct is to wander up, join the circle, and listen quietly until I understand the topic of conversation before beginning to join in. Other people seem much more willing to wander up to someone I'm in the middle of talking to, say hi to them and start their own conversation with them, often about something I don't even know about (a mutual acquaintance, for example) and can't usefully contribute to, leaving me thinking ‘Oh. Now what do I do?’. Now on the one hand this is reasonably easily explained by the phenomenon I describe in the previous couple of paragraphs, but on the other hand it also strikes me as textbook Usenet etiquette (lurk for a bit until you understand the rules before attempting to post), so I wonder if Usenet might also be a partial cause :-)

So I suppose what I'm really wondering here is, to what extent is this a problem with other people (I find it difficult to imagine that none of the cases I've listed involved someone else being rude or insensitive), and to what extent is it a problem with me (taking politeness to the extreme of ridiculous overcaution and self-effacement)? And also, to what extent have I misperceived the situation to begin with (do I actually monopolise conversations without even noticing, for example)?

It's concerns like this which have recently made me make an effort to try to spend time with one other person, or at most a very small group, as often as I can. None of these social dynamics issues really seems to apply in a one-to-one conversation, so it's very relaxing and I actually get a chance to enjoy people's company more.