Connections? Connections! Connections...
We all concede that drunk people tend not to watch what they say when they are drunk (and surely they will not remember what was said a day later), but sometimes certain drunken comments can simply destroy a good "drunkenly euphoric" moment in, literally, an instant of time. The speaker tries to bolster his own credentials by sprinkling some, what he himself conceives to be, strips of pure gold on a night of gradually built up good impression over hours of genuinely friendly conversations, only to destroy that image by, well, trying a little bit too hard.
Few comments can galvanize a group of young professionals and grad students to resort to pure hatred and the most vulgar profanities being used in their minds as talks of the "future." Whoever that touches the topics of what we are going to do after graduation and/or few years of entry-level work better keep the conversation focused on the general, non-personal, humble variety...or the result is a walk straight into a dense mental minefield where touching off an explosion among the audience is only a matter of time.
And there is not a more perfect example of such instant explosion than a comment spoken last night in a little pub at two o'clock in the morning. The conversation, naturally enough for a bunch of foreign students in a UK devoid of post-grad work visa, ended up on the issue of how to stick around in Britain after the inevitable expiry of our student visas. As we all express our frustrations, one American pops in and straight up blurts out, "I KNOW I will get a visa to stay, because I got family connection with the heads of all the major companies."
A moment of dreadful silence...we all standing there, thinking, "wait, what, did he just say that?! And, eh, why did he just say that? Is that suppose to impress the girls or something?" Well, maybe if he was in some random bar with a random group of juvenile teenagers, that comment could have sent his stock through the roof, but he does realize that he is talking to a bunch of LSE people, i.e. some of most independent-minded and absolutely self-reliant people one would ever meet in the world?
Any conversation after that inflammatory comment was thrown on the table, understandably, cannot possibly persist without some intense anger barely suppressed through the communal effort to maintain some sort of air of outward friendliness. For "queasy" people like myself, staying until witnessing the bitter end of that effort was just a bit too much. "Not digging the conversation," some of us had to call a night at that moment, leaving the host and some others to deal with a situation more cumbersome than taking drunk people back to their respective houses.
But, lets take a step back from an equally juvenile streak of profanity-filled curses that is bound to be the first reaction as we left the scene of the crime. After all, what motivates our anger is as much our hard-to-admit inferiority complex as the sheer inappropriateness of the comment about connections. As much as we believe ourselves to be independent, we do all need some practical help when it comes to fulfilling our dreams, whether they be the short-term ones about making ends meet, or long-term ones about satisfying our personal ideals of "saving/changing the world".
We honestly are all frustrated by a system where 95% of the jobs in the world are not even advertised and perhaps half the advertised jobs already have "competent" candidates pre-selected through some secondary source of recruitment. Beneath all the f-words and the a-words, we do feel envy, a certain degree of jealousy that tells us that solid networking, not some hard-to-define "skills/expertise" stipulated in our one-page resumes, is the element that lead to jobs for high-level pay or for genuine professional interest.
So, ultimately, we all have to secretly concede to the guy with the connections. Sure, he made some enemies in an instant, but he was perhaps the only one in the night who was drunk enough to let copious amounts of alcohol lead to the dirty, dark truth that no one else was willing to bring up. For that, and for the amazing connections he proclaim to have in the UK (lets hope that part was true, and not some alcohol-induced lie), he does have my respects, and I am sure that other unwitting members of his audience, when they wake up in the morning from drunken anger, would agree with me to some extent...
Few comments can galvanize a group of young professionals and grad students to resort to pure hatred and the most vulgar profanities being used in their minds as talks of the "future." Whoever that touches the topics of what we are going to do after graduation and/or few years of entry-level work better keep the conversation focused on the general, non-personal, humble variety...or the result is a walk straight into a dense mental minefield where touching off an explosion among the audience is only a matter of time.
And there is not a more perfect example of such instant explosion than a comment spoken last night in a little pub at two o'clock in the morning. The conversation, naturally enough for a bunch of foreign students in a UK devoid of post-grad work visa, ended up on the issue of how to stick around in Britain after the inevitable expiry of our student visas. As we all express our frustrations, one American pops in and straight up blurts out, "I KNOW I will get a visa to stay, because I got family connection with the heads of all the major companies."
A moment of dreadful silence...we all standing there, thinking, "wait, what, did he just say that?! And, eh, why did he just say that? Is that suppose to impress the girls or something?" Well, maybe if he was in some random bar with a random group of juvenile teenagers, that comment could have sent his stock through the roof, but he does realize that he is talking to a bunch of LSE people, i.e. some of most independent-minded and absolutely self-reliant people one would ever meet in the world?
Any conversation after that inflammatory comment was thrown on the table, understandably, cannot possibly persist without some intense anger barely suppressed through the communal effort to maintain some sort of air of outward friendliness. For "queasy" people like myself, staying until witnessing the bitter end of that effort was just a bit too much. "Not digging the conversation," some of us had to call a night at that moment, leaving the host and some others to deal with a situation more cumbersome than taking drunk people back to their respective houses.
But, lets take a step back from an equally juvenile streak of profanity-filled curses that is bound to be the first reaction as we left the scene of the crime. After all, what motivates our anger is as much our hard-to-admit inferiority complex as the sheer inappropriateness of the comment about connections. As much as we believe ourselves to be independent, we do all need some practical help when it comes to fulfilling our dreams, whether they be the short-term ones about making ends meet, or long-term ones about satisfying our personal ideals of "saving/changing the world".
We honestly are all frustrated by a system where 95% of the jobs in the world are not even advertised and perhaps half the advertised jobs already have "competent" candidates pre-selected through some secondary source of recruitment. Beneath all the f-words and the a-words, we do feel envy, a certain degree of jealousy that tells us that solid networking, not some hard-to-define "skills/expertise" stipulated in our one-page resumes, is the element that lead to jobs for high-level pay or for genuine professional interest.
So, ultimately, we all have to secretly concede to the guy with the connections. Sure, he made some enemies in an instant, but he was perhaps the only one in the night who was drunk enough to let copious amounts of alcohol lead to the dirty, dark truth that no one else was willing to bring up. For that, and for the amazing connections he proclaim to have in the UK (lets hope that part was true, and not some alcohol-induced lie), he does have my respects, and I am sure that other unwitting members of his audience, when they wake up in the morning from drunken anger, would agree with me to some extent...
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