The age guessing game...

Have you ever played the childish game of age guessing. When someone asks you just reply

"What do you think?"

Long time, I have been doing this in a vane effort for the people to acknowledge me as a human being instead of a kid, i.e. what I used to look like. I would drive home the point that I wasn't 14 but 18, 21 rather than 17... You name it, just substract between two and five years and you should be about there.
What would that do? I would come out as a young-looking smartass with an obvious lack of self-esteem and desperately looking for recognition...

Yes! I know...

It's harsh!

But as I grew somewhat more confident - I can know talk in public, although walking up to a random girl is still out of the question - I learnt the many useful informations you can get out of it and now I really do enjoy it. And I even enjoyed some success in the guessing game* myself as the invariable reply would be

"And me? What do you guess?"

Although I got an age ten years off recently, but what is 22%?** But I digress wildly...

So there I was going from desperately looking for recognition to mildy confident, I found out one thing that can be deemed useful in the all-important ballet of men and women. Let me tell you a little story, the setting is BCG Christmas diner 2004. The table is some random male and female young consultantlings, 5 and 2 respectively to be exact, a secretary and her boyfriend***. I am sitting near a rather chubby female consultant also know as AK****, she had been a consultant for Accenture for four years before entering BCG. She joined in 2004 a couple of month after I did, hence a couple of months before this story happens. At some point, someone points out I am the youngest employee***** and she reacts with a loud voice making us the only conversation at the table:

- What? How old are you?
- Guess
- I don't know 27
- Hmm no
- LESS?
- Yes!
- Hmmmm... 25
- Nope...
- 24?????
- Yes...
- Ok and me?
- 29
- How'd you know?
- Well, let's just say I'm good at that*
I begin laughing silently... everyone watches me and she's startled!
- What?
- It's just... That I have a theory about age guessing...
- And? What does it say?
- Oh I can't tell it now...

Of course I ended up yelding to popular pressure, which built up the thing a lot... All the time I would be saying "it's not such a big deal, but it's 100% true"

- It's just that people guess closer to their age if they are sexually interested to heir counterparts... and away if not!

Awkward silence

Me blinking to her and faking a kiss towards her

- But I'm sure you're not sexually interested in me...

Laughs

This story aside: I really swear by this rule even if this case was special and probably an exception due to the fact that she had a positive prejudice because of our working for the same firm.

So next time you are asked for your age, please take a second, think about it and reply with a big smile:

How about you take a wild guess?

It might indicate if you should go for it or not...

Ciao, P

* Attire, behaviour, wrinkles on the face and wrinkles on the hands are the additional clues to what any girls says. That being said surprisingly few girls remember having said that they had been working for a year at some firm after completing their studies when the question comes and they are baffled to think you found out their age by yourself, but that's another story altogether...
** I'll take stupid math problems for 500
*** Those two insured we avoided talking about work, so bless their presence...
**** not AKL (for Marc who actually knows the people there)
***** which by then was not true anymore, but let's continue!