Howto Have A Normal Conversation
Get Over Yourself
The one thing that will help you have a good normal conversation with someone is getting over yourself. Trust me, I'm just as guilty as the next geek. We are all arrogant jerks. I'm not even sure how my fiance handles me sometimes.The problem is geeks tend to know a lot about one specific thing so that's all they want to talk about and they HAVE to be right and have their opinion heard regardless of if anyone cares. And generally people don't give a crap about what you are ranting about.
There is no doubt that you are smart. Trying to throw it into other people's faces, however, does nothing put make people NOT want to talk to you. What you need to do in completely frank terms is shut the hell up and get over yourself.
What NOT To Talk About
Here's some examples of conversations that you can have with your geek friends that will make other people want to run away and never talk to you again. "Richard Stallman is a genius.", "Richard Stallman is an over the top freak.", "GPL3 is going to ruin the entire open source community.", "Han shooting first was the worst idea in the world but was somewhat redeemed by the release of the super special edition DVD renditions."Now you and I would probably spend hours on those conversations but other people really don't care. This, however, is just one form of an example. Another example would be a 'normal' person says, "Oye, Windows crashed again... This gets annoying!". This is not an open invitation for you to start spewing anti-Microsoft propaganda. We all know Microsoft blows but normal users don't care about alternatives. At the very most you can say, "Yeah, that sucks." Don't say, "Well yeah, Bill Gates is the anti-christ and by installing his OS onto your machine you have invited the devil into your house!"
What To Talk About
Obviously you are somewhat specialized. You know a lot about this or that but don't know things about stuff like, lets say, sports. It's completely unfair of me to expect you to have a conversation about the NFL but there is a big secret here. I'd like to prefix this by saying that I'm using sports as an example but this could go for anything such as politics, religion, and anything else. The secret is, if you don't know much about sports just tell the person that you don't follow sports that much. Unless they are a sports geek and know nothing but sports they will probably bring up a new topic. Keep playing the russian roulette until you get a subject that you know about. There is no shame in not knowing a topic. No one knows everything. Just wait for a topic to come around.Once you have a new topic that you know about, don't dominate the conversation. Participate in the conversation, just make sure the other person has a chance to speak. One more important thing is never take anything personally. If you get into a debate don't get defensive. Debate calmly and you are a geek damn it so you better win! Ok, that was a joke. If you lose a debate then you need to gracefully LET IT GO!
