Whose Network?

Some commercial jingles resonate with me; some do not.  Most of them I don’t really hear, thanks to the mute button.  Or maybe it’s the fact that we only watch TV for an hour or so each evening and just on week nights at that.  In fact, I suspect that there are many expressions that have found their way into the mainstream of American English in recent years that we just ‘don’t get’ because we are out of the television loop.  Like what is a hash tag anyway?  Or does that even have anything to do with commercials?

But I do like the “out of your network” concept that has surfaced recently.  It’s right up there with being invisible.  Neither of those circumstances occurs often to us here.  After all, it’s a small community and we’ve lived here for a long time.  We are often lulled into thinking that we know just about everyone.  But every once in a while…

 For instance, last night we went out to dinner with friends from Long Beach which, to us in Oysterville, is at the “Other End” of the Peninsula.  We have lots of friends from “That End” but we are apparently not in the South End Network.  We went to a restaurant that we’d never been to even though it’s been open for several years and we’ve heard good things about it.  (Besides not watching TV, we don’t get out much.  What DO we do, I often wonder…)

Our companions greeted all the servers by name as well as just about every person that came into the restaurant over the course of the evening.  We knew only one of those many people. Period.  We were definitely out of our network.  Except for the view out the windows, we could have been in a restaurant a hundred or even a thousand miles from Oysterville. 

Nyel and Sydney Who Are Sometimes Invisible

The ‘going invisible’ thing isn’t part of a TV commercial, as far as I know, and it is something that has happened to me almost all my life.  But once I had established myself here at the beach and had gotten to know folks, I went invisible less and less often.  It still happens occasionally, though.  I’ll be standing in line somewhere, waiting my turn at the counter or the cash register and when I finally get to the front, the cashier (or whoever) looks beyond me and helps the next person in line.

The first time that happened when Nyel was with me, I realized that becoming invisible was catching.  He had never experienced the phenomenon before – a fact that I chalked up to his being almost a foot taller than I.  But, even so, why were we both ignored and the next person recognized?  I think I would understand it better now.  It’s probably the unstated version of “not in your network.”