The first five minutes of a conference call is what I consider “me time”—a bonus period that I can use to blast through the odds and ends of my to-do list, like checking the delivery status of a package or paying my credit card bill, while I wait for people on the client side to join.
If someone happens to be on the line during those first few minutes, then it’s just a different kind of Me Time—more performative in nature, an opportunity for me to regale business executives with the local weather forecast or a competitive analysis of in-market milk substitutes.
Yesterday, during the first few minutes of a conference call with a client who I have come to know on a personal level—by which I mean that she attended my Zoom wedding—I found myself discussing, in great detail, my recent purchase of a Dust Buster. I had spent the first two minutes of Me Time reading the user manual and was now brimming with the details about my handheld vacuum attachments, as well as its wet-vac capabilities.
“Say you spill a bowl of cereal,” I told her. “No problem! Just vacuum it up. Boom boom boom.”
She responded in kind, telling me about a knock-off Roomba she bought herself for Christmas. And then we both laughed because as far as conversations go, it certainly wasn’t our best work.
“Do you remember when we met and I was interesting?” I asked her. “Remember when I did things and went places?”
I guess that could be said of all of us.
Sad as my small talk repertoire is, I take solace in the fact that it’s better than Valtteri’s. His go-to topic is Helsinki’s lack of public trash cans. He usually happens to be complaining to other dog owners so it’s fairly relevant. But still, he takes it too far. I can tell that people tune him out once he starts listing the cross streets in our neighborhood where there is a public bin—which is well before he starts describing his morning walk route which is based almost entirely on the presence of trash cans.
God help the other person if they so much as nod because Valtteri will take it as an invitation to talk about the garbage can situation across town, in other, more affluent areas—about how many trash cans they have and why that may be.
“They’re everywhere,” he complains to a man who is wearing flip flops in a dog park, as though this is a person with excellent judgment whose input we need. “Just one after another—every corner! By every bench!”
This is what passes as social injustice in Helsinki—a disproportionate amount of garbage cans in the Swedish part of town.
The only thing worse than when Valtteri or I attempt to make small talk on our own is when we do it together. Most of our friends have young children and have faded from our social circle. I assume this is because they are fully occupied with their kids’ upbringing and not really interested in exposing them to our nonsense during their formative years.
In any case, Valtteri and I find ourselves in the unfortunate position of looking for new friends as people in our mid- to late-30s. Nowadays, we prowl parks and terraces for reasonable looking couples the way we looked for hookups at bars in our 20s. You wouldn’t think that we’d have much trouble getting people to hang out with us, but you’d be wrong—and that’s probably because we are constantly discussing Airfryers and garbage cans.
Well, in all fairness, we didn’t always do that. Those are our recent topics of choice. Before we got a Dalmatian and a deluxe kitchen appliance, we talked about other things, like the optimal style of drinking glasses for various alcoholic beverages. Inevitably, it would come up that someone in the group has been served a drink in an incorrect glass and one of us will use our cell phone to show what the ideal choice would be.
“This is a stout glass,” my husband will say, displaying a photo of a contoured pint glass or goblet. “If you put a stout in a regular pint glass, you’l lose some of the taste by the end.”
Most people are ready for another round by this point—preferably at a second, undisclosed location.
Valtteri and I have been through so many conversations that have left us looking like dullards or snobs (or both) that now when we are expecting guests, we usually take a few minutes to outline which topics to avoid. In most households, these are subjects like politics and religion, but for us it’s kitchen appliances and TikTok.
“Do not let me go down the rabbit hole of the Flaschenkühler,” I warned Valterri two weeks ago when friends were joining us for dinner. “It is so embarrassing, the way I talk about that thing. If I start, just cut me off.”
The Flaschenkühler, if you want to know, is a copper wine bottle chiller that Valtteri bought me for Christmas the year after I asked for a champagne bucket. In actuality, what I wanted was something that I could fill with ice and hold small cans of flavored tonic, so that guests could help themselves without rooting around in my fridge. But Valtteri thought I actually wanted to use the champagne bucket for champagne, which is funny because I drink champagne fast. So no need for a bucket, if you know what I mean! Anyway, Valtteri figured the Flaschenkühler was a great choice because it doesn’t require ice, which is great because we never have enough to fill a bucket. And if you haven’t already noticed, this is why I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about the Flaschenkühler. Because no one cares, not even me but I just can’t help myself!
Sure enough, when our friends came over that night, Valtteri and I were on our best behavior, casually offering an assortment of snacks from our Airfryer without performing some big song and dance about said device. We served drinks in glasses without commentary. We offered chilled wine and just left it at that. We made it all the way through the meal and were just about to fix after-dinner drinks—ginger cocktails that require fresh lime juice—when Valtteri made the fatal error.
“Let me get the juicer,” he said.
It all happened so fast and yet I felt like it was slow motion, the way he opened our kitchen cabinet to remove a small electric citrus juicer that no self-respecting couple would admit to owning.
“What’s that?” our friend asked.
“It’s a juicer,” Valtteri answered, revving the blender like it was a motorcycle. “I was really into orange juice a few years back.”
From across the room, I shook my head furiously. No juice stories, I pleaded with my eyes.
But Valtteri couldn’t hold himself back any more than I could when the conversation turned to housecleaning in the months that followed my purchase of the drill mop. When he finally got done describing his custom orange-ginger-lemon juice blend, after he had juiced a lime, after he poured our drinks into the ideal glasses, I raised mine—to lovely new friends who will hopefully be back.
Oh my. It’s like reading about myself. I have difficulty picking up on social cues so my main issue is ending conversations. Oy vey, it’s terrible.
we had other friends over for dinner yesterday and they brought their puppy. valtteri was taping the dogs playing and in the background you can hear me basically giving a 30-second sales pitch for an air fryer. oy vey indeed.
yep. I get that way with vitamins and miracle cleaning goods. People start that nod-and-smile thing, and I realize I’ve done it again. “oh look!” they cry, “there’s Mary, we’ve not seen her in AGES, we’ll be right back…”