A shopkeeper drew me a map on the back of a flattened box. Four turns, a gate, a courtyard. She was pleased about it. She said something that I took to mean that there was music there in the evenings and that I should go.
I went. I got the four turns right, found the gate, walked into the courtyard, and knew within about thirty seconds that I should not have been in it. It was not hostile. Nobody said anything to me. It was a gathering of people who all knew each other, in a space that was clearly somebody’s, and my arrival changed the volume of the room in a way that I could hear. I stood near the entrance for maybe two minutes, said a hello nobody had asked for, and left.
She was not wrong, and neither was I
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story makes somebody the villain and there was no villain.
She recommended a real place that she liked, in good faith, to somebody who had asked her where to hear music. What she did not do, and had no reason to do, was model how a stranger walking in alone would land in that particular room. She was not thinking about me as an intrusion because from where she stood I was not one. I was a person who liked music.
And I did not do anything unforgivable. I turned up, understood quickly, and left. The failure was in between the two of us: I had asked a question that did not contain enough information about myself for her to answer it well.
The information I had left out
My question had been, roughly, where can I hear music. Every part of the useful context was missing. Alone. A stranger. Not able to speak with anybody there. Not known to a single person in the room. No way to be introduced. Leaving in two days.
If I had said even half of that, I suspect she would have sent me somewhere else, or sent me with her nephew, or told me to come on a different night. People adjust recommendations constantly when they know who they are adjusting for. I gave her nothing to adjust for and then followed her answer as though it had been tailored.
The version of the question I use now is longer and less elegant. Something like: I am on my own and I do not know anybody here, is there somewhere I could sit and listen without getting in the way. The phrase without getting in the way is the important one. It signals that I know there are rooms I do not belong in, and it gives the other person a clean way to route me.
Reading a room in the first ten seconds
There are a few things I now check before I fully commit to walking into a space, and they are all boring.
Does the door have a threshold that people are pausing at, or do they walk straight through. Is there a counter, or is there just furniture. Are people’s coats on chairs, which usually means they have been there a while and expect to stay. Is anybody arriving who does not greet anybody. That last one is the most reliable. If every single person who comes in is greeted by name, I am in somebody’s living room with a different function.
None of this is a rule about a type of place. It is just the difference between a room that is set up to receive strangers and a room that is not, and that difference exists everywhere, including on my own street.
Leaving well is a skill I did not have
The worst part of that evening was not arriving. It was the ninety seconds after I understood, in which I hovered, tried to work out whether leaving immediately would be ruder than staying, performed a small pantomime of looking at my phone, and generally made the discomfort last longer than it needed to.
What I would do now: a nod to whoever is nearest, a clear and unhurried turn, out. No apology speech, because the apology speech makes it about me and forces somebody to reassure me. No explanation. The kindest thing is to reduce the size of the interruption, and a fast quiet exit is smaller than a well meaning one.
I have got better at this. I have also stopped treating leaving as a failure. A place I walked into and out of is not a wasted evening. It is a thing I now know about a street.
Going back and saying so
I went back to the shop two days later, which I did not want to do at all. I bought something I did not need and then told her, in about six words and a lot of gesture, that the courtyard had felt like a private thing and that I had not stayed.
She was not offended. She laughed, actually, and then said something to a man stacking crates, and he said something back, and there was a short conversation between them that I did not follow. Then she wrote a different name on a different piece of card, and pointed at a day of the week, and held up seven fingers.
That second recommendation was correct. It was a room with a counter and a door people walked straight through, and I sat at the end of a bench and nobody’s volume changed.
The part I keep
What I took from it is not a warning about following advice. It is that a recommendation is a function with an input, and if I do not supply the input, I get somebody else’s answer to somebody else’s question and then behave as though it was addressed to me.
And the correction loop only closes if I go back. The second card would not exist if I had done the comfortable thing, which was to avoid that shop for the rest of the week and quietly decide the advice had been bad. It had not been bad. It had been answered to a question I did not ask properly, and the only person who could fix that was me, in person, on a Tuesday, buying a bar of soap I did not want.