On the rare occasions I get to (have to?) meet people, I'm never very good at actually maintaining a conversation. I can get through the basic "Hi, what's your name, what do you do" sort of small talk, but after that I generally want to talk about Smalltalk. And very few people ever want to continue that discussion.

I do, however, have the openers down pretty well. One of my standard conversational techniques is to be self-deprecating in the name of humor. So many of the conversations go something like:

Me: Hi! My name's Ken. What's yours?

Other Person: Blahblahblah. What do you do for a living, Ken?

Me: Oh - I'm a software developer and project manager for a major financial news firm.

Other Person: Oh. That's cool.

Me: I don't know that 'cool' is really the right word. Interesting, perhaps. But not 'cool.'

Other Person: polite laugh

I was reminded of this standard interchange when doing some data analysis for aforementioned financial news firm. I was looking at the number of users who had some particular setting in their account, which had four possibilities. The first set of data I got included all of the user records that were in the database, including deleted or changed records. From that data, I got the relative percentage across each setting. But that wasn't accurate enough, so I got a more realistic set of data, which only contained actual current users. And though the raw numbers changed significantly, the relative percentages only moved in the 2nd decimal!

Upon noticing this, I said: Wow! Statistics are so cool! And then thought about it for a minute.