Lately I’ve been finding myself attending a large number of functions. At these functions, I typically find myself engaging in small talk with people who I don’t really know all that well. Since this is a professional setting, we are usually discussing work but people often end up talking to me about aspects of their work that I’m not particularly familiar with.

The other night, for example, I was at a function where a bunch of realtors and lawyers and tax people were meeting. Somehow the topic of conversation turned to the importance of cost seg engineering. I kind of followed along until the point when someone started discussing the use of a net present value calculator to figure out how important this was.

The truth is, I don’t really like small talk. I’m good at it. I think it can be beneficial in terms of networking and even sometimes learning new things. But sometimes I miss the old college days when we all just talked about the latest gossip and didn’t care that we weren’t discussing important things! I suppose that’s its own kind of small talk, though. And I probably only prefer it in that grass is greener kind of way!

Technorati Tags: cost seg engineering, net present value calculator