Life manual

I had a fun conversation today about the various little semi-scripted social interactions you have to perform, how nobody really teaches you the rules, and how easy they are to get wrong. For me, at least, young adulthood was a series of wacky hijinks caused by a lack of this kind of knowledge. Go up to the counter to order at a café, get told to sit down and wait for table service. Sit down at a café, wait for half an hour before I realise nobody's coming. Never ever ever jump the queue, except for sometimes when you're just giving back a form or something. Or at a bar where it's complete anarchy.

Anyway, it would be kind of fun to put together a life manual, with little how-to bits on the most mundane and obvious everyday stuff. How do you catch a bus? How do you eat at a restaurant? How do you buy food at a supermarket? Attend a football game? Deal with salespeople? Order drinks in a pub? All these things are simple enough, but involve a bunch of little steps that make you look a bit silly if you don't know them.

Fortunately for me, I was blessed with passable social skills, a single culture to learn, and a lack of anxiety about looking dumb. But if you're not so lucky I can imagine those situations being pretty intimidating. And regardless it seems like a pretty inefficient way to learn. It'd be a great help to have a manual that could tell you things like whether you pay when you order takeaway or pay when you pick it up.

Actually, I'm still never sure about that one.