Conversationally challenged

This morning I was quietly doing some work at home, when the doorbell suddenly rang. As I live in an apartment building I have that typical phone in my own apartment that allows you to ask who’s there. Unfortunately the phone is broken. So I have two choices: either let the unidentified visitor enter (I can still use the button to open the door remotely) or go down and see who it is.

In this particular instance I wasn’t going to let just anyone in. Call me paranoid, but then again we’ve had somewhat strange visitors before here. So I went down to open the door.

Standing outside was a young guy – perhaps a couple of years younger than I am. He had blackish hair that was combed back with a lot of gel and wore a curious outfit. I guess he’s one of those people who decide, even though it’s freezing, that they don’t need to adapt their outfit to the weather. As if they think: “I don’t care if it’s -5°. A shirt and a summer’s jacket will do just fine”. Strange lot, and the more I keep my eyes open for them on the street the last few days, the more I seem to come across them.

Anyway, there he was. So I open the door and give him a friendly but inquiring look. Eyebrows slightly raised, head cocked to the side and looking slighly upwards. As if to say: ‘Yes?’. At this point the guy doesn’t say anything but just steps into my rather small hallway. Now call me paranoid, but to me that’s odd. Someone rings my doorbell, I open the door for them and they just step inside, without so much as a word. And even though I didn't initiate the conversation, I'm not supposed to, I think. He is.

So I said to him: “Can I help you?”, trying to sound casual and accommodating, but probably not able to erase all notes of suspicion in my voice.

He looked at me sharply and said “I’m here to see my brother. You must know him”. That’s what he said, literally and with the same emphases. Now I found this odd for a bunch of reasons, the most important one being what I subsequently asked him. “So why didn’t you ring his doorbell then?”

At this point the guy was obviously annoyed, as I surmised from his curt answer: “Because his doorbell is broken.” I replied: “Ah, okay, it’s just…” and I left my sentence to trail off. Obviously, I meant to say “Ah, okay, it’s just that I found it a little strange that you ring my doorbell and you don’t tell me why you're there when I open the door”, but I didn’t say it out loud. I mean, that’s the way people handle social situations like that. You leave something unsaid but imply it, rather than being rude by saying it explicitly. It’s called ellipsis. We do it quite often. For instance, why when you accidentally touch someone’s hand in a crowded train you say ‘Sorry’ and not ‘Sorry I touched your hand’. That’s just making things more awkward.

However, this guy wasn’t too socially adept, as I was heavily suspecting by now. And my suspicions were confirmed by his answer to my “Ah, okay, it’s just…”. He said: “It’s just… what?”

So I tried a variety of the same technique of ellipsis. I said: “Well... it’s just that I wanted to know”, again leaving out what I wanted to know. And then I made a conversational mistake, I followed the remark by “It’s not as if I don’t believe you, you know”.

At which point he just sighed. And that was that.

I think this easily qualifies as one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had. I mean, I can't for the life of me figure out what the sigh exactly meant. Surely he didn’t realize that my “It’s not as if I don’t believe you” actually implied the opposite (i.e. “Yes, I am suspicious of you”)? He'd react more angry if he realized that. Or did he realize that he had been wrong all along by not telling me why he was there in the first place? But that could hardly have been the case, since he was probably lying to me. Indeed, I could clearly hear him knock on his brother’s door and shout his name in the hallway. His brother wasn’t there though. Instead they met a few moments later back on the street. (Oh yes, I confess. I was spying).

But the strangest thing is that I now feel bad about the whole exchange.

Indeed, who is strange here? The guy who rings someone’s doorbell and doesn’t explain why he’s there, or the guy who has spent the whole day analyzing what was said (and not said) in those 30 seconds?

Right.