Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996

Arnold and I have developed a certain facility at a game I call conversational handball. This game requires a server, whose job is to make apparently random statements that have some relevance to something in the vicinity, or something recently mentioned in conversation, and one or more players, whose job is to figure out what the statements are about and how they relate to preceding events. You get 10 points for identifying the topic, an additional 5 for identifying its relationship to what's going on (if obscure), and one point for every question you ask the server which gets a useful response and doesn't distress the server. Upsetting the server gets negative points in proportion to the distress.

Arnold is very good at this, because he plays solitaire a lot (Jacques is the server). I have some talent at it (I think it's a female thing -- the very best players aside from Arnold are all female, but then again most men will simply ignore random statements, rather than playing at all, in my experience). A sample round:

Arnold and I are discussing the trip he and Jacques took the day before. Arnold explains that first they went on a boat ride through the slough, and saw lots of animals and counted them and it was lovely, and then they went to Geoff and Barbara's where Barbara had made "a little dinner" which turned out to be an Ethiopian feast. We return to the animals in the slough, and Arnold is rapsodizing on the subject of otters sleeping cutely, when Jacques says "But there weren't any grasshoppers." One of us says, hopefully, "Uh-hunh?" hoping to trigger a further utterance, with no result. No points. I try "There weren't any grasshoppers?" (Again, this sometimes produces a follow-on sentence.) No points there either. Arnold tries "In the slough, there weren't any grasshopers?" This is almost worth negative points, as Jacques looks puzzled and says "In the slough? I don't know, I suppose there were probably grasshoppers," and clearly starts to wonder whether we're following the conversation. He helpfully adds "It wasn't a real one." I am visited by inspiration and scoop the entire 15 available points with "It wasn't a real Ethiopian feast because there weren't any grasshoppers in it," which Jacques clearly regards as the first sign of intelligence either of us has produced recently. (Later on, Arnold pulled ahead through the ability to realize that "We saw more than I've ever seen before in one place. Thousands of them. They must have come long distances, too. They were actually in the way quite often." was a discourse on the subject of *bicyclists* while I was still searching for referrents in the animal kingdom. He got in at least three questions with useful answers on that one, too.)

Although I knew that doing well at this is a useful skill in the family (actually, so is regarding it as a game) I hadn't particularly connected it to work until yesterday, when, in the middle of a 45-minute conversation on random topics, the IS guy for Israel said for no apparent reason "The only problem is, we have to keep reconnecting the mouse." This is a fairly staggering statement, with no obvious connection to software, and only long practice reconnecting dangling utterances enabled me to come up with the answer "You mean SoftWindows loses track of the mouse?" to which his answer was "Yes, but only when we run in Hebrew." We had not actually been discussing Hebrew SoftWindows for at least 15 minutes.

This suggests to me that all those years of experience in telephone support probably help in talking to Jacques, as well.