While I was in transit at the Miami airport on my way to DC, I stopped for a beer. Across the bar from me were a couple of guys in their early 20s. It was a square bar and they were sitting on adjacent sides, several seats down from each other. I didn’t realize they were travelling together until one guy got up to show the other guy something. Strange that they were sitting so far apart, each staring fixedly at his own phone. Then I realized all at once that they were colleagues travelling together, experiencing that awkwardness of sharing taxis, adjacent airplane seats, and dinner tables, but not friends. A third guy (also staring at his phone) eventually showed up to fill the gap between the other two.
Watching them made me remember what it was like to travel to tiny Midwest towns with colleagues I had nothing in common with during my first post-college job doing environmental site assessments. The worst was the end of the day when we’d all meet up in the lobby to get dinner together at some chain restaurant, if we were lucky enough to find one within a 20 minute drive. After spending all day sweating in some field somewhere together, most of us had nothing left to say. So we’d either order one more beer than we really wanted, or get Geoff to tell that story he loves about giving CPR to a guy who had a heart attack in the emptiness of Wyoming.
I was willing to bet that the guys at the bar were probably on Facebook, finding it easier to connect to people far away than with the ones sitting two stools down.
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