The Thursday Ramble: I Talk To Strangers

Much to the dismay of others, I talk to strangers. When I sit on a plane, I always ask my seatmates if they are headed home or headed out. Sometimes there is no response, other times it leads to a conversation. I have a few dozen stories that start with a sat next to a guy on a plane one time. 

On the recent trip, there was the tall-thin kid from Georgia who had just completed Air Force boot camp and was headed to some remote base in Texas to study munitions.  Going to boot camps was his first time away from home, his first time flying on a plane. 

A few years ago I sat next to a guy who worked for HP. He was on the road selling print on demand book publishing. If you order a self published book on Amazon, odds are it is printed on the machines he was selling. He said it was the future of book publishing, and he was right. 

I sat next to a guy on time, who was returning home from a job interview. He worked for a company that made control systems for cars. They were developing autonomous driving controls. He said, I need to move on. He went onto explain that he had spent most of the month before in a conference room full of engineers and ethicists trying to write computer code to decide if faced with running over the baby buggy or the wheelchair, which should the car run over. He said "I just can't be the guy who wrote that piece of computer code." 

I sat next to a guy one time who described himself as a corporate executioner. His specialty was firing senior executives in corporate America. He was an outside independent contractor. He said about 80% of the time the reaction is relief, thankful that the ordeal is over. The other 20% of the time, he is paid well to hear all kinds of rude things said. 

There was the morning that I slept with Gabriel Iglesias's road manager. It was an early morning flight out of Detroit, going to Phoenix.  I had been in Detroit for a memorial party the day before, and checked into the hotel in the airport the night before, as I recall the flight left at like 7:00 AM. He had finished up a series of shows in Detroit was flying home. He had been up late the night before at an aftershow party. We were in the first row of first class, and slept most of the way to Phoenix, before talking about what had taken us to Detroit. All we did was sleep, and then talk for a last few minutes of the flight. Nice guy headed home for a few days of rest.