As I was brushing my teeth this morning, an amazing thing came to me. First, some background.

As you probably know, last Thursday was ICON Day, which is this conference kind of thing I organize on the topic of technology in teaching and learning. People from all over campus come, and we even have a couple of people from far away, such as a hotshot from the University of Minnesota’s Digital Media Center and a rep from some software we use who came all the way from Canada.

So anyway, one of the activities was an interactive keynote, in which the person from Minnesota and our own Associate Provost of Undergraduate Education led a discussion. People were sitting at tables, and they were to talk about some pertinent topics, and an assigned staffperson was blogging notes for later sharing.

At that time, I was hovering around, making sure things were going okay, and a faculty member walked up to me. We’ll call him Eduardo. I’ve worked with Eduardo a lot, and though he’s a very smart and basically reasonable guy, he has never grasped the concept of “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” He’s always got to get a jab in somewhere.

So Eduardo comes up to me and tells me he has to leave because of a family emergency. Fine. I say something sympathetic and tell him no problem. He then goes on to tell me some more details about the emergency. I express a little more sympathy, and the he says, “And I don’t go in for this touchy-feely stuff,” and gestured derisively toward the groups that were discussing the role of technology in the accreditation process the University is currently undergoing.

Thanks, Eduardo. It was nice of you to explain why you were ducking out, but did you really need to point out to me that the activity I worked really hard to coordinate sucks? I just bit my tongue, wished him well on the family situation, and vented to my colleagues when I got a chance.

Now here comes the revelation part.

Eduardo really does like the touchy-feely stuff, he just can’t admit it. There was no need for him to go into greater detail about his personal situation with me; he could have just said something had come up and left. There were lots of people there, so it’s not like he was leaving a gaping hole. But instead of just leaving quietly, he felt a need to come over and elicit sympathy from me twice (and then, yes, give me a little sucker punch).

But sometimes surly people communicate more than just rudeness through sucker punches. I think old Eduardo craves human interaction more than he would care to admit.

And, even though he drives me crazy, I really do like the guy.

In metered doses.