Hello, My Name Is _______ And I _______

Let's practice small-talk before we need it again.

It’s weird meeting new people right now.

In my (non-newsletter) job, I’ve gained three new coworkers in the last couple of months. They all seem to be perfectly pleasant people and good additions to the workplace, but something’s off. Granted, there’s always some degree of awkwardness inherent in workplace interactions, but it’s all the more strange when you’ve worked with someone for a decent amount of time and still have no idea what the bottom half of their face looks like, a working relationship that used to only be appropriate between sitcom neighbors.

Now, this isn’t a complaint about masks—it’s possible to believe that wearing a small piece of cloth over your face during indoor interactions both kinda sucks and is also very easy to do without being a baby about it—but rather an acknowledgement that the slow and unsteady return to normal society as the pandemic hopefully abates is not going to be without some social clumsiness.

Most of us have spent some portion of the past year-p…