A Brief Look at Intense Eye Contact

When I walk down the hall at work, and another human walks towards me, there's an inevitable awkwardness, and it centers on eye contact. Do I look? When to look? Do I greet this person? It seems like the longest twenty seconds in the world. Thoughts run through my mind -- can I put a paper bag over my head? Pull out a service ferret from my purse and fake sight problems? Whip out the eyeband that guy wore from Star Trek and slip it on casually like No big deal?

There's an art to eye contact in the hallway. There are specific distances at which it's acceptable to greet each other. I wish I knew the precise distance and could demarcate it on the hallway rug with a bit of painter's tape. I know that greeting someone or making eye contact while 50 feet away is much too far, but ten feet away, and you're too late.

I think about this all the time, and one of the conclusions I've come to is that eye contact is most awkward with a person you vaguely know. With friends -- it's not weird. Strangers on the street -- it's not weird. It's the people that fall in the middle. It's people you "kinda" know like "Ed from IT" or "Mindy from Accounting" or "that guy who takes a bite out of a cookie and leaves it on the communal table," but you don't know them very well.

Why is this? What is it about that level of social connection that makes that moment so awkward? Honestly, if I could pay a modest sum to just become a beam of light during those moments when I'm walking down the hall, I would consider it. Until then, I'm keeping a paper bag, a vested ferret, and Trek star Geordi La Forge's headband at the ready at all times.

I read that a fly has compound eyes, and inside those compound eyes, are thousands of units processing visual information. I don't know how flies do it; I would just end it. 

I didn't expect that this post would end with me finding a newfound respect for flies and their artful social grace, but life is funny like that. It almost makes me overlook their approach to eating, a phenomenon, which, if you want to lose your appetite, brilliant science writer Mary Roach describes artfully in her book Grunt.