Story #1

why a man is an iceberg

It had been about a month at my new job. Fun times when you discover your colleagues’ personalities and they studiously observe fresh meat in the common kitchen around lunchtime.

The common kitchen wasn’t as big, nor as nice, as the kitchen at my previous employer’s office but there was still a decent selection of tea that I was frequently availing myself to. It was during one of those trips to the kitchen to make myself some tea that a colleague decided to make some small talk:

“So, you’re really a tea person, then”, they said.

I was caught off-guarded and asked why they would think that.

“You always drink tea and never coffee”, was the reply.

At that moment I understood how it would really seem that way. The fact was, I was enjoying good coffee at home and at various cafes nearby, never at work where the coffee was batch-brewed in a multi-liter thermos (not in itself a bad thing, though) using questionable quality ingredients.

And this is how the part of my behavior visible to my colleague created an image in his head of me being a tea connoisseur, while the reality was that I cared so much about my coffee that I avoided the one at work, being content with tea as a hot drink of choice.

I’m confident that my colleague wasn’t an exception and we all tend to fill in the blanks with “more of the same” when we’re trying to make sense of other people. Surely, what else could we fill those blanks with? Only we should all probably remain careful about what we fill in, about that “more of the same”.

It’s harmless to think someone likes tea when they prefer coffee. But it’s much less fun to feel inferior to a friend who’s always on top of it because he seems so during the one hour coffee you’re having weekly. Or that your relationship is inadequate because your friends never argue when you meet them every second weekend of the month.