Social Skills

So there is this ad going around on the tubes with the text:

I'm popular. You're not.

#1 Guide to Social Skills.

My first thought was how few social skills one would need to have to say something like "I'm popular. You're not." Then I thought that someone who had poor social skills might think this is a good thing to say, so the ad is actually extremely well targetted. I am flummoxed.

I'm reminded of a sign on the door of SCUM -- the Society for Collegiate Undergraduate Mathematics -- at the University of Calgary. When I first arrived, the sign read

Welcome to SCUM!
No social skills required.

I liked the blatant nerdiness on display there, but the next year I noticed a change:

Welcome to SCUM!
SOME social skills required.

That was somehow disappointing, but another year later it changed again:

Welcome to SCUM!
Few social skills required.

The only undergraduate mathematician I ever knew well was Robert. His opinions, in fact, were rarely a mystery. I asked him one day about the sign, and he told me. I cannot quote Robert on a blog read by my family, nor even paraphrase him because his speech is essentially a long string of vulgarities punctuated by descriptions of obscene acts. I survived middle school and high school but Robert showed me that it was still possible for language to shock me. So really the best I can do is give a paraphrase of a translation from Robert-speak to normal-person-speak.

In short, Robert admitted that both changes to the sign were his fault.

The first time he had managed to say, or do, something so awful it shattered the limits of SCUM's tolerance. He was banned and the sign was changed from "No social skills" to "SOME social skills", that word SOME in uppercase and underlined multiple times. After meeting other members of SCUM it horrifies me to imagine what this could possibly have been. Robert would not tell me.

The second change occurred when Robert was elected president of SCUM and had the sign changed to "Few social skills" as a rational compromise.

I had a class with Robert my last semester there as he was trying to finish school. He spent most of the semester in a drug-induced haze, skipping classes and dressing as a pirate, until he realized that he needed to pass all his classes in order to graduate. In an astonishing period of a month he was able to finish his backlog of homework and tests, complete his final projects, and, also astonishingly, beg and plead the professors he had been verbally insulting for mercy.

I left school to live on the river, and Robert left Calgary to work on a doctorate at the University of Toronto. He said his real calling was to become an evangelical missionary, and a PhD would lend authority to his claims that science does not disprove the existence of God.

He is one of many Calgarians I miss dearly.