Exit strategies

You've been there. It's the hour-long precept, the ninety-minute lecture, the three-hour seminar, the indefinitely-long conversation where you realize, five minutes in, that hell really is other people. It's the time when you inadvertently mention your interest in medium-format cameras, late-model Nissans, or contemporary Venetian statuary to an uber-enthusiast who just happens to have spent the last five years of his life preparing an interminable monologue on the subject — starting with a detailed list of all of the relevant objets he's stashed in his dorm room.

It's when you stumble into a panel with five dreary academics and one shrill monomaniac who's sure to screech at you if you try to sneak out during her soliloquy.

We've all been there. It's a fact of academic life that the most important preparation for any event is not to have done the reading, but to have a good exit strategy.

Easy ones first. A giant lecture in McCosh 50 or Reynolds Auditorium is trivial: Just take a seat somewhere near the rear doors.

If, however, you sat front-and-center, or if you happen to be in an exit-in-front room like Frist 302, more finesse is required. Announce that you have to go to the bathroom. Not aloud, of course — just walk rapidly, decisively, and bowleggedly, with a pained expression, to the door.

(Hopefully, the speaker won't notice that you took your bag. Maybe she'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you carry your own two-ply toilet paper.)

Smaller events call for smarter techniques. Note that lying your way out isn't particularly smart — it's a bit risky:

"What do you plan to get out of this seminar?"

Option one: "Seminar? I thought this was Herpes Anonymous."

Option two: "Ah! Just remembered: I left a kettle going. Looks like I'll have to drop this class."

Option three: "No hablo ingles."

You could try to sneak out, and mutter a nondescript excuse about your workload if you're challenged —- but that approach is particularly uninspired, and is all-but-unworkable in a sub-six-person meeting. In those circumstances, a good exit takes some good acting:

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Kudos to the first cellphone manufacturer who adds a button that, when surreptitiously pressed, prompts the phone to wait sixty seconds and then vibrate loudly enough for the neighbors to hear. With a shocked flourish, you could whip it from your pocket, glance at the caller-ID display, go ghost-white (your "shocked" color may vary, depending on your parents') and dash out of the room. The truly brazen can pull this off just by looking at their watches.

(Armchair ethicists may see no ethical distinction between these techniques and the outright lying that I denounced above. There's no moral distinction — but the latter is unsporting.)

One-on-one conversations call for special preparations, as they can strike anywhere, at any time. If your interlocutor is warming the air with a tedious recounting of the summer he spent appraising Etruscan chamberpot art, just wait for a pause. In the silence, absently glance at your watch, look shocked —"Oh! I've got to go," — and leave. If you don't wear a watch, just look at your wrist. He might not notice.

But if he's really good, he won't pause. There will be nary a chink in the verbal wall into which you can lever an excuse. Your best bet is to wait for him to breathe, and excuse yourself. If you can't wait, show a look of interest, then transition to shock.

Only the most oblivious will fail to pause for your excuse: "I'm sorry, your work with socially-inept nematodes was so enthralling that I almost forgot about my thesis! I've got to go work on it now." (Bonus points accrue if he was actually talking about Bulgarian voting patterns.) Then smile and walk rapidly away.

These theatrics would be unnecessary if we had an inoffensive means of conveying a lack of interest. I do not have the psychological creativity to come up with one, but I will say this much: If you stopped reading this column before this point, regardless of your excuse, I won't be offended. Joseph Barillari is a computer science major from North Canton, Ohio. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays. He can be reached at jbarilla@princeton.edu.