Greetings

What's your name? Where are you from? What do you do?

These are the three main questions we ask when we meet someone. I use these questions all the time, and I'm expecting it in return when I meet someone new. During the course of a casual first meeting, if a stranger skips these very basic steps, I almost feel like a social contract has been breached. I feel robbed of my meet-and-greet protocol. It is an actual comfort to have these questions in my pocket. For whenever I am confronted with a new face, whether it's because our mutual friends' attention have drifted away from us, we are filling the void while waiting on the bartender, or we simply met eyes on the el train, I know I have at the very least a good 10 minutes of conversation before I have to actually think of something to talk about with this person. And who knows, maybe I'm from the same area, which adds at least another 15 minutes.

It was my junior year while attending the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I was on the swim team there and we had just finished our final day at the Big Ten Championships. It is tradition to have a team dinner where all the families get together after the long weekend. The festivity usually transpires in some banquet hall at the hotel we are staying, which this year happened to be a beautiful place in Indianapolis called Holiday Inn. The coaches say a few words, we have a buffet meal, we chat, and all the guys, regardless of performance, can't wait to get out of there and just goof off with all this exhausted energy, just pining to get home and start the real celebrations.

The main purpose of the meal though is the getting together. The chatting. The meeting. The recounting of the weekend. We as social beings find comfort in eating as a large group, especially after a time period of stressful circumstances. Holidays, graduation, a death in the family, or in this case a competition. I don't really know why. Maybe it has something to do with the resulting feast after the exhilarating big hunt.

The parents usually know each other after spending so much time up in the stands watching us compete, but not always. My mom, my dad, and my friend Mikey, a senior, and his parents were sitting at a table donned with a paper tablecloth. We had just sat down to our meal of gourmet pasta and garlic bread upon a plastic plate. The father of one of the freshman on the team came over to our table and wanted to introduce himself. He had met Mikey's parents and wanted to make sure to meet mine, as I was a co-captain with Mikey and he wanted to meet the other captain's parents.

Now what transpired was absolutely nothing more than ordinary. To be honest, I don't remember exactly what was said, but I'm pretty sure everyone involved followed standard procedure. Afterwards, the man smiled, as did my parents, and we got back to our garlic bread. But then my dad said something that for some odd little reason has stuck with me. He looked at me and matter of factly said, "I wish, just for once, someone would ask not 'what do you do' or 'where are you from,' but 'who ARE you?'" Then he turned back to chatting with my mom. To him, it was a fleeting thought; to me, it has changed how I think about strangers.

Upon thinking about his gripe further, I realized that my father had a point. All too often we use these questions as a crutch, giving a facade that we really care about the person to which we are speaking. Don't get me wrong, there are times when I really am interested in what a new acquaintance is telling me when we first meet, and not just when it is a cute girl at the bar. But a lot of times it is simply filler. I feign interest in my new "friend" because I know our short time together will pass and, chances are, I will never see him again. I am polite, and I am rewarded in kind. But, really, what a waste of time for the sake of mere pleasantness; and why do anything in life if it is not genuine?

After constant usage, these three little questions, instead of simply describing certain aspects of who we are, actually start defining who we are, which, in reality, is utterly shallow. Why should my place of birth, in which I had no choice, define my personality? Why should the name my parents gave me, again in which I had no choice, define my character? Why should the job I took as a means to make money doing something I enjoy necessarily define my essence? As I respond to these simple inquiries repeatedly to stranger after stranger, I pigeonhole the definition of me in my redundant answers. My father was making sense.

However, before I was completely convinced he was right, I asked myself two follow up questions: If someone really did come up to me and asked, "who ARE you?" would I know how to truthfully respond? And, even if I could, would I want to share my innermost thoughts about myself with a total stranger? The simple answer to both these questions is a resounding "no."

We all, despite my sounding like Shrek with his onion analogy, have many layers to our personality, our character, our being. Each successive layer represents another boundary to whom we let inside. I have countless "friends" or acquaintances on my outmost layer; these are the passerbys with whom I make eye contact on the city's sidewalks as I make my trek home. The next layer would be the people I have met and, at the very least, discussed my name, my job, and my geographic origin. From there, the layers continue, with each stratum of my multi-dimensional character inhabited by fewer and fewer souls. Assuming I actually knew what to say, if I allowed a stranger to cut through all those layers and inform him of my true self when he asked me who I really am, it would rob my closest, innermost friends the value of our relationship that took many years, laughs, tears, and stories to create. Simply, it wouldn't be fair. And I, in turn, would feel cheated if it was that easy to get close to my best friends.

So, I would have to say that I am OK with these three questions when meeting someone new. As the old Chinese proverb says, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Any relationship has to start somewhere, and these questions, despite being hackneyed and shallow, at least provide building blocks and common ground from which to grow. And considering that you and I are just starting to get to know each other, I thought it would be appropriate to begin with the casual and fully established meet-and-greet.

Hi. My name is Tom, though most of my friends call me Tommy. I live in Chicago but was born in Barrington, IL. I work as a Senior Investment Analyst at Prudential Capital Group.

Nice to meet you.