Format: Post-call (and several months after)

This one unfolds slowly. I want to tell you about a customer and what happened over about six months, because that's how long it takes for this kind to show itself fully.

First call was a tune-up. Early in the spring. He was retired, early seventies, wife travels a lot for her work , she was gone when I got there. He was perfectly pleasant. We talked while I worked. He had opinions about things and wanted to share them. I have opinions about things and was willing to engage. The call was easy and went long because we talked.

He called again in the fall for the heating tune-up. Same thing. Good conversation. By the time I left I'd heard a fair amount about his life , his career, his kids, what retirement had been like, some opinions about the neighborhood and the town. He was engaged in a genuine way, not performing. And I was engaged back, because I genuinely like people and the conversation was real.

Then he started texting.

Not about the system. About things he'd read. A news story he thought I'd have thoughts on. A question about whether I'd ever done work on a specific kind of system he'd heard about. Then he forwarded me something funny. Then he texted on a Monday afternoon just to say hello.

I answered all of it, because none of it was unreasonable individually. But at some point I noticed I was answering his texts more often than my actual friends.

And then he asked if I wanted to come to his granddaughter's birthday party on Saturday.

John Cacioppo spent decades at the University of Chicago studying loneliness. What he found , documented in his book with William Patrick, published in 2008 , is that loneliness is not just an emotional state. It's a biological signal, as real as hunger or thirst, that the social connection your nervous system needs is insufficient. And like hunger, it doesn't always direct you toward the right food. A lonely person's social hunger can fasten onto available connections in ways that don't quite fit , relationships that are warm and real but not designed to carry what's being asked of them.

He wasn't unpleasant. He wasn't inappropriate. He was lonely, in the particular way a retired person is lonely when the social scaffolding of a career is gone and the spouse is away and the regular structure of human contact has thinned out. And I was a person who had shown up twice in his house and talked to him like an actual human being instead of a technician who wanted to get back to the truck.

From his side, I think, that was rare enough to be notable.

I didn't go to the birthday party. I didn't say yes and I didn't say no , I said something like "I'll see if I can make it" which was wrong of me and I knew it was wrong when I said it. I was avoiding the thing.

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