Ha! I'm the best person I know of when it comes to putting out "keepaway vibes." (And I very much like it that way, thanks.)

I find it so entertaining that you are Gregg seem like polar opposites in this regard...and yet you love each other for it.

I find it hilarious, how much he wants to not talk to strangers!

He finds my opposite take on this amusingly mystifying.

I spent most of the last ten years as a whitewater/hiking/glacier guide. It was a fun job for the most part (yes, doing other people's vacations for a living has its moments), but I was always frustrated with most of the other guides' attitudes towards the clients. Being mostly young and very full of themselves they tended to look down on the clients. Just because they were better at the particular activity they were paid to be better at, they usually thought they were just "better" at everything else.

Maybe it is my advanced age (I am twice the normal age for a whitewater guide), but I always found meeting and talking to a wide variety to people to be the best part of the job.

I've met many WW2 veterans, including a survivor from the Yorktown (Midway), a US Ambassador, famous actors and musicians and plenty of "normal" people with very interesting lives. I've also gotten some great life and career advice. Plus, some people are just very pleasant company.

The writer nails a problem: Having unprestigious items on your resume can be a black mark.

Everyone sermonizes about "hard work," but, when it comes time to hire someone for a competitive position, managers hire the person with the glitziest resume.

I know my summers in a meat packing plant gave me the motivation I needed to stay in school..

If I were in a position to hire, I would always value someone who had restaurant work on their resume, particularly as a server or cook. Those are usually people who know how to work hard.

'Having unprestigious items on your resume can be a black mark.'

That's too bad. It also surprised me. I hired a young man because I was impressed with all the different jobs he had been willing to do to go to college...mover, changing bedding in a hotel(the cleaning done by a separate team), crossing guard, it told me he was willing to work hard. He's been with us 12 years and he's amazing.

I was going over some career development stuff I got sent at work (it was sent to everyone in my division) about the revamped career tracks. Looks like they want people like me to go out and get another degree - yeah right...and it sounds like a BS degree - bull shit that is.

I wish I had better luck talking to strangers. I have had some good luck and interesting conversations but most have sucked. I just realized most of the good ones have been while travelling. I had a life coach years ago and she suggested I try and start more conversations. On one of the first days I got 100% rejection (all polite or just ignored) but then two different people started conversations with me. One the guy wanted to tell me about his toe nail fungus and how nail saloon had made it look better...but he couldn't remember where - the west side or maybe the northern part of the city to the south west. Then there was a lady wearing jack-o-lantern shorts (in Feb when it was freezing outside). She wanted to tell me about her breaking down and missing work. I asked about the shorts since it was no where near Halloween. Jack-o-lanterns are fun. Not all the conversations where that bad...but I don't think I learned anything meaningful...if anything it made me more cynical. The coach actually told me to stop.

Well, spending a summer reading Joyce will certainly teach you quite a bit about writing - like how not to do it. That emperor has no clothes.

It is a shame that gruntwork internships look better on a resume than decent summer jobs. However, crowd the resume with the right computer-search keywords, and you'll get the interview - then you can make the experience shine when you speak of what you learned.

My general experience has been that if some stranger is willing to just have a conversation with me that is a real bad sign.

I believe their is a major advantage in being a women when it comes to this. All but one of the people I know who have good experiences talking with strangers are women. The lone guy is extremely good looking or so I have been told - he seems average to me. My friend who is now a women says she has a much easier time starting a conversation with random people now that she is a woman than as a man. And now after being a women for a few years she says she has a reaction when random guys approach her - Is he hitting on me? Is he trouble?

Banker, I too have difficulty in talking to strangers. I find that it works better at a venue where everyone is there for a purpoose -- it gives you some obvious ice-breaker questions like "How long have you been doing this?" I travel a lot for work, and in the evening, instead of just sitting in a hotel room, I like to go out and find a dancing venue. It's easier to get conversations started there because there's an obvious subject that everyone there is interested in.

Having said that, some of my favorite conversations with strangers have been in out-of-town bars. A couple of years ago I was on a business trip to Boston, and I decided to check out a local bar. They had a Red Sox game on the TV, and I got to talking to the guy sitting next to me about baseball, and we had a pretty good conversation. I told him that as Braves fan, I owed a note of thanks to the Red Sox. He asked why. I told him it was because the Sox's September collapse at the end of the 2011 season kept people from noticing that the Braves also folded in September. He got a laugh out of that.