I am a volunteer on campus for a peer counseling group and today we had our monthly training session. The organization is structured into teams. All the volunteers are broken down into several small teams which meet weekly and then the leaders of each team form their own team that also meets weekly and then once a month we all meet together for trainings. Therefore, volunteers who aren't in your team are only ever seen once a month and at those monthly meetings, very little interaction is involved.
As additional background info, I'm fairly social-phobic and find it quite difficult to go up and talk to people. At one of the breaks in the training, I went to go get a coffee and was standing there fixing my coffee while a fellow volunteer did the same. The employees at the Tim Horton's had a radio player which happened to be playing the classical song 'Bolero'. I decided that could be my excuse to start a conversation, so I said 'It's been a while since I heard this song *pause*....Bolero.' The volunteer looked at me a little shocked, politely smiling and tried to listen. She didn't know the song. I'd assumed it was one of those classical songs that everyone comes across in elementary music class but apparently not so.
I tried to recover and explain that I'm not like a classical music aficionado or anything. So I said that I'd seen it played in concert at the NAC. I was in music class. It's a good piece. Very famous. You can't dance to it but it's pretty good.
The more I said, the worse things got until I noticed that she had already started walking away from me and started talking to other people, occasionally turning back if I said something she felt obligated to respond to.
At one time I would have been reduced to tears and sent into a downward spiral of self-hatred and depression. And the spiral did begin. However, during the next break, I decided to turn it into an amusing anecdote to tell to a completely different volunteer. Somehow discussing a time when you behaved very awkwardly leaves people gutting themselves laughing where the actual incident will leave people confused and uneasy.
Funny how that works.
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