Accept the Candy

When I was a child, nobody warned me not to speak to strangers. Nobody had to.

Strangers were just that: strange, temporary intrusions into routine. Interactions with them were either hurried or agonized over but certainly not relished.

Everybody else I knew seemed to see these encounters as feats of endurance, too. My hometown of Edinburgh, despite its size, is the insular, gossipy sort of place where everybody knows everybody else and little beyond that.

My family is small; my school was positively tiny. I graduated with the same group of 60 that I started with, give or take a few casualties. (It was a boys’ school. There were casualties.)

My entire social circle was set before I even knew I had one—not out of some class-conscious master plan by my parents or anybody else’s, but by the bounds of polite society. Virtually everybody obeyed the same set of rules, designed to minimize anxiety all round. I have spent whole nights in the company of some friend-of-a-friend without ever looking them directly in the eye—much better than embarrassing everybody with public displays of friendliness.

So I moved. Far. I traded my precious hometown for a university full of gregarious overachievers.

Which came, of course, as a shock. Until I went to college, I had been able to go days without meeting anybody new.

How would I ever learn everyone’s name? What would we all talk about?

I had learned, naturally, to be charming in short bursts, but the effort of going through the whole nasty process every day was soon too much.

“I haven’t met you yet,” became my arch and insightful opening line.

It was all so unnatural.

So it is bewildering to realize that I have spent most of my two years at Harvard talking on the phone to people I will never meet.

Comping The Crimson, I had no choice.

I joined in order to write but, as my editors informed me, that meant talking. Here, they said, this is how, and watched me so I wouldn’t chicken out.

My first such call was to some professor at the School of Public Health.

The sensation of phoning somebody I knew nothing about, who wasn’t expecting my call, and who didn’t work for my cell phone company was daunting and more than a little awkward. But he didn’t care. Neither of us obeyed those bizarre rules of first introductions and the world did not end.

Since then, I have called chatty press officers, invited myself to administrators’ offices, and bugged Harvard Square store owners. I have approached countless random students in dining halls across campus, asking them what they think of anything from the food to Larry Summers’ resignation.

Miraculously (as it seemed at first), people would help. Far from averting their gaze or palming me off, interviewees would e-mail me extra information, share anecdotes, call me back to check details. They were often funny and invariably nice. No longer an abstract phobia, strangers were an extracurricular.

Next, I took a job calling alumni to raise money for the law school. It was a big jump. Whereas the discomfort had previously been all mine, the alums I phone do not generally want to be reached.

I still remember staring at my computer screen at the start of my first shift, gasping at the though of calling a stranger and asking them for money. How rude of me!

And of course my first call ended with a flat-out rejection. Being lawyers, many of them have no problem telling me exactly what to do with my headset.

But others are very willing to ignore the strangeness of the situation and make the most of our brief conversations. Recent grads will joke about student loans. Older alums will hand on worldly advice, or hushed observations that there are too many women at Harvard.

Of all of the strange conversations I’ve had since arriving at Harvard, those which should be the most perfunctory and short—which I make for money rather than for interest or to get to know anybody—have often been the most surprisingly enjoyable.

That is why I wrote this Endpaper, which is either the final step in shedding my childhood reticence, or the first part of my transition to that blowhard you meet at bus stops that won’t shut up.

And you don’t know me at all. How embarrassing.


—John R. Macartney ’08 is a Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House. FM is glad he uses the phone more often now, as he has the most delightful accent.