Handshake rituals

Shaking hands should be simple. It's supposed to be a gesture that anyone can take part in without needing to think about in advance. Put hand out, grasp other person's hand, shake, release, continue life. Yes there's always a bit of confusion if one of the people is left handed - do you adjust for them, or stick with right handed convention, but all in all it's pretty clear what you're supposed to do and if we just drowned all the left-handed babies like I keep recommending then we'd be fine.

Unfortunately, the skiing community has taken this simple, time honoured ritual and made it confusing and difficult. So far I have experienced 5 types of binary (as in involving two people) hand gestures, and there are probably more out there. These are:

The Standard Grip (or Low) Handshake:

The standard grip handshake is a common form of greeting across the English speaking world. Both parties face each other and each extends a hand with their palm facing across their body and their thumb pointing upwards. The extended hands must be compatible: Either both right hands or both left hands. A right-hand-to-left-hand standard handshake will not work.


Each party clasps their partner's hand so that their fingers wrap around the side of the hand closest to the little finger. The thumb should be wrapped around the back of the partner's hand at a comfortable angle. Once this grip has been established, the clasped hands are moved firmly up and down through a 10-20cm range for between 1 and 3 oscillations. There is considerable variation in this shaking action, even beyond the parameters set out above, but shaking too vigorously or too many times is considered creepy. A particularly weak grip or a complete failure to shake your partner's hand at all is also considered wierd (see also: Jeremy Codhand).

The Reverse Grip (or High) Hand Handshake:

Both parties each extend one hand at roughly chest height with their thumb pointing toward their own face. They then clasp their partner's hand so that their fingers wrap around the region where the base of the thumb meets the wrist. When done correctly, this should mean that the two thumbs involved in the handshake are adjacent, facing each other and interlocking. This handshake does not actually involve a literal shake.


Similar in form the the standard grip handshake, the reverse grip handshake allows each person involved to use the handshake to pull their partner towards themself and use their spare hand for a brief platonic embrace. This is also possible with the standard grip handshake, but the reverse grip has the important advantage of keeping the clasped pair of hands at chest height during the embrace. Using the standard grip, the clasped hands tend to be directed downwards towards the naughty bits as both parties are drawn together and this can make for an awkward moment mid-embrace.

The Bump:

Current sociological research suggests that the hand bump in the skiing community arose from the need for a convenient gesture that could be completed while wearing ski gloves and holding a ski pole. Both parties involved in the bump form a fist with their desired hand. They then move their fists towards their partners with the aim of gently bumping their fists together. After contact, both parties retract their fist and return to normal hand activities.


Sources tell me that there are a number of variations to the bump, including (but not limited to) the "explode", the "explode-implode", and the "go with it". Needless to say, this simply confuses the situation even further.

The High Five:

Made famous by music videos from the 80s, the high five is a slap-based hand gesture. Both parties raise one hand above shoulder height with their palm facing away from their own body and towards their partner's hand. Each person then moves their hand towards the other's, producing a mutual hand slap. It is customary to follow through by striking a glancing blow that moves past the partner's hand towards the thumb side of your own hand.


The Pole Tap:

This requires each party to have a ski pole. Grasping the handle of the ski pole, each person swings their pole towards their partner's pole in a gentle and predictable arc. At the completion of this arc, both poles meet, with contact occuring in the bottom half of each pole. This should produce a gentle pinging noise. Pole taps are not intended to indicate superiority or damage equipment and care must be take to exercise appropriate force.


The inability of snowboarders to participate in the pole tap is considered exclusive and the gesture is now considered discriminatory. For this reason, pole tapping is increasingly uncommon and frowned upon.

The problem with having five binary hand gestures is that it's never clear which gesture to use. This breakdown in conventions has made greeting new people awkward and alienating. I have found it best to make a clear hand gesture that makes it obvious what greeting is intended, but in situations where the other person extends their hand in an ambiguous way, it is difficult to avoid awkward hand groping. I suspect I may have recently high-fived a person who was only intending to wave to me, and have since spent several hours considering this possible faux pas. This is truly a strange and troubling world.

Another Old Post: Encounters With Possums

Every now and then I look through the old posts and drafts on the blog to see if there's anything I've missed or can delete. This time I found a post from pretty early in my time in NZ where I was struggling to come to terms with the role of possums as environmental villains. I know that regular reader Barratt likes the old posts so I thought I'd post this one, even if it is wildly out of date. Please enjoy Encounters With Possums.

New Zealand's worst introduced species is possums. They do more damage here than goats, stoats, deer, rabbits or anything else (except for people, but let's not think about that). There are estimated to be over 70 million of them in New Zealand, and given that NZ is pretty small, fitting this number of possums onto the landmass requires them to stack up on top of each other into huge towers.

In Australia, possums are cute lovable rogues that live in garage doors, walk across the electricity wires at night, belch at each other in the wee hours and try to sneak off with your food at popular campsites. In New Zealand, possums are an entirely different proposition. They eat native birds, eggs and snails, plus their selective grazing on new growth on native trees destroys large areas of forests.

In New Zealand, it is your duty to kill possums wherever they are found (like rabbits in Australia). This is a bit confronting if you're used to possums living in your garage and sleeping in someone's old suitcase on a nearby shelf while you fix bikes or do uni work. However, I am, as always, desperate to blend in so my latest encounter with a possum was less chivalrous.

There is a small picnic area where the access road to Broken River ski field meets the highway. This is a popular spot for the very stingy members of the skiing community to camp or sleep in their cars before driving up the hill to go skiing for the day. And, since this campsite is nestled within the beech forest, it is full of possums.

While camping there recently I noticed a possum coming into the picnic shelter to steal my food and pick at my leftovers. By yelling at it and shining my torch in its eyes, I backed it into a corner. Seized by my grim duty as a temporary New Zealander, I figured I should club it to death with a nearby stick.

I'm not sure if you've ever tried to club anything to death in the corner of a picnic shelter, but it's a slightly awkward proposition. Usually, when clubbing something, one swings their club in a circular arc, building momentum that is imparted to the target upon impact. But, if you swing in an arc within a rectangular picnic shelter and you try to hit the corner, the walls obstruct the intented path of the club, and you don't strike cleanly. If I had thought about this in advance, I would have approached along one of the walls, which would have allowed a clean swing into the confined space in which the possum was hiding, but that would have reduced the psychological effect of having cornered the possum, which was encouraging it to keep still.

So, the result of all this is that I didn't really hit the possum very hard. Instead, I basically just prodded it with a stick. And I've hit possums before - you have to hit them pretty hard before they take notice and stop chewing holes in your tent. In Australia, if you hit a possum (which is illegal, and I've only done it to stop them from chewing through my stuff to take my food or biting my feet - both of which have happened, and the biting on the foot thing was completely unprovoked), they usually look suprised (because they're protected and people don't usually hit them), and then keep doing whatever they were doing until you start whacking them with a water bottle or something. In New Zealand, when you hit a possum, it tries to kill you.

Of course, this was my first time hitting a possun in NZ, so I wasn't yet aware of this significant behavioural difference. To my considerable suprise, this possum responded to being prodded by lauching itself straight towards my face. In flight, it extended all four feet directly in front of it and reached its pointy claws for my delicate and handsome visage, in a fashion not dissimilar to those face hugging aliens from the Alien films. Fortunately, I was able to recover from the shock of this turn of events and, drawing from my years playing baseball with the Woden Valley Dodgers as a child, managed to club it out of the sky before it made contact.

The possum hit the ground and scurried for the doorway of the picnic shelter. I took an almighty swing at it as it reached the exit, terrified that it would come back with its friends and get even. Luck, however, went the way of the possum as the stick I swung clipped the frame of the entrance and snapped just before striking what has hopefully going to be a killing blow, but probably would have just made the possum mad enough to stand up on its hind legs and tear me apart. The possum ran off into the bush and I was left holding my broken club and thinking about what might have been.

In the end, I'm happy that things worked out the way they did. I can save face with the locals by claiming that I did my best to kill a dastardly possum, and I can save face with the possum in my garage back home by not having to think about how I disposed of the corpse of one of it's bretheren. Of course, my manhood is somewhat dimished by having been defeated in single combat by a small marsupial, but that's a small price to pay.

The delicate hours

As I have mentioned many times on this blog, the life of a ski bum is not all beer and skittles. I for one do not even like beer, although I am quite partial to skittles.

Consider, however, the following: Each day you and your housemates go out into the cold and have a rollicking good time. That good time just the right kind of fun, and the eating facilities at the ski hill are just the right kind of inconvenient that you often don't eat as much as is prudent. That good time is also tiring, usually in proportion to its goodness. The better the snow, the more tiring the turns and the more you ski.

This is an equation that doesn't add up (which means it's an inequality, rather than an equation, but anyway). At the end of the day, the various members of the household inevitably stumble home, tired and hungry, to recharge their batteries before the night's activities or the next ski day. Usually a few hours of sitting around and eating is sufficient to restore everone's spirits. But during this time, a certain degree of tact is required.

These are the delicate hours. From about 4:00 to about 6:30 each evening, life in my house is a bit like nap time at preschool, but with vastly more internet. I'm sure this scene is played out in similar ways in houses across Rossland. Everyone will mooch around, or sleep, until someone makes dinner and life is restored to the household. During this time, a careful balance must be struct between being antisocial and annoying the people around you. One of the best things about my most excellent housemates is that everyone manages this balance pretty well, and that quite spontaneously, someone will make something awesome for dinner.

So there you have it. For around two hours a day I have to be quiet and as unannoying as possible. Life is tough. So, how was work today?

Cultural Universals: Housemates

So far in this blog I've made a big deal of the pretty tiny cultural differences between the places I've visited. So perhaps it's time to consider one of the cultural contants that unites us. In fact, there seems to be one social convention that applies to all sentient life forms across the universe: The obligation to gossip about changes in your housemate's love lives. It seems that no matter who you are, where your live, or what you believe, when someone you live with gets a new significant other certain duties immediately arise. Often, this process begins well before the first drunked pash or awkward morning.

To fulfil your duties as a good housemate there are four steps. Circumstances might demand that you skip a few steps or some other similar variation, but where possible you should complete each of the following tasks to the best of your ability.

Step 1: Gossip

In some housemate relationships (those are relationships that your housemates get into, not relationships that you get into with them - a totally different kettle of fish) it can be unclear whether something is genuinely going on or whether it's just the human equivalent of brownian motion. During this uncertain time, your obligation is to secretly gossip about the two (or more, in especially interesting cases) parties as much as possible. This is especially important if there is even the remotest possibility that they might be spending that moment together. Ideally, you should have considered and discussed every possible outcome of the impending liason in detail, so that no matter what happens you can claim that you saw it coming.

Confirmation of your initial suspicions often leads to the second phase.

Step 2: Meddling

Confirmation that some kind of romantic interest is afoot comes in two common forms. In the first, your housemate is interested in someone and is unsure about how to proceed. In the second form they manage to hook up with someone without your assistance, in which case you would skip this step. Assuming that they are pining for that special someone, convention requires you to meddle incessantly. This may extend from simply giving advice (no matter how unqualified you may be), to setting up meeting opportunities between the two parties, all the way through to dubiously legal activities involving involuntary late night minivan rides. Your personal misgivings about the virtue of the budding relationship or the prudence of your required course of action must be put aside. You are not merely some reliable or disinterested friend. You are a housemate, and a sacred trust has been bestowed on you to meddle in your fellow housemates romantic lives. Do not forsake your duty.

Of course, your housemate might well embark on a new romantic adventure without your assistance, rendering this step obsolete. As discussed in step one, it's important that you're as familiar as possible with the developments in the budding relationship, so this should come as no suprise. It is theoretically possible that they might have found new love without your knowledge, but this represents a complete failure on your part and you would have let the institution of housematery down. So, assuming that you've seen the writing on the wall, let us continue.

Step 3: Awkwardness

As soon as you have reached even a credible suspicion that the liason has moved from mere pining or planning to actual intimate personal contact, you are obliged to confront your housemate with your suspicions in a way at a time that inconveniences and embarrasses them as much as possible. It is important to retain deniability in your confrontational approach, so that if they were actually out all night helping their ailing grandmother to set up a facebook account you can save face. Consider the following example: During breakfast, your housemate Susan has just walked through the door after a suspected night of romance with her new parter Ashley. A strong opening gambit is required. Perhaps something traditional and classy like:

"So, Susan. Out all night. How's Ashley?"

The advantage of this approach is that if Susan replies "I don't know, I was helping Grannie with her Bebo account.", you can say something like "Oh yeah, I know, but I was wondering how Ashley was. Just in general. And I thought you might know." Smooth.

But in the more likely scenario that Susan looks awkward and starts fumbling for the cereal, it's time to step things up. Perhaps:

"In the sack. How's Ashley in the sack?"

You can go straight for the kill and ask how Ashley was in the sack in your initial greeting, but you'd want a high degree of confidence before taking that approach because if Susan was with her grannie you've significantly overplayed your hand.

The goal here is to obtain confirmation that the happy couple have hooked up, while also embarrassing one or both parties as much as possible. Once completed, the final stage awaits you.

Stage 4: Hilarity

In stark contrast to the moral and logistical support you are expected to provide in step two, step four involves extracting as much humour from the new relationship as possible. More cynical writers would suggest that the whole process exists merely so that you can extract maximum hilarity in this stage, but I'm much too nice to say something like that. Remember that jokes about the new couple will become boring in a matter of mere days, so you need to make as many of them as you can while they're still fresh and exciting. A time honoured strategy here is to reframe everything that happens in your housemate's life in terms of their new love interest. Sarah receives a text message? Surely it must be from Ashley. Sarah is tired? Perhaps they're exhausted from tandem bedroom gymnastics. Sarah leaves the house? It must be a romantic tryst. Sarah is hungry? Pregnant? In this way you can make just about any aspect of Sarah's life a source of joy for you and misery for her.

Soon the novelty of these jokes will wear off and you, having discharged your duties as a housemate, can return to normal life. Whenever I laugh at something that wasn't a joke in a way that makes me look callous, or stare in bewilderment at US currency, or drive down the wrong side of the road in a car park, I can always draw comfort from the things that bring us together, whoever and wherever we are.

Adventures in Sarcasm

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was having difficulties communicating with the locals. Sadly, it doesn't seem like things are improving as quickly as might be hoped. Despite my employer's claim that Canadians are the kings of sarcasm, it seems that there is a gulf between their style of communication and the one that I am familiar with that belies their royal sarcastic status.

In this environment, I must be finely tuned to the warning signs of impending communicative catastrophe. To miss these signs as I did a few days ago is to risk offending people in ways that are at once comical and embarassing.

I should have known better when the boss showed me a new style of winter boots that had come into the store. They were a somewhat less than attractive combination of brown faux-leather and fluffy hot pink trim. Upon seeing the latest addition to grace our shoe section, I solemnly intoned "They're beautiful." to which my boss replied, somewhat perplexed "I think they have a bit too much pink."

Right, no harm done so far. A simple misunderstanding between me and my employer, he thinks I like pink kids boots, but he already thinks I'm a bit odd so it's OK. But this is a warning that my sarcasm radar is malfunctioning. It is not correctly calibrated for my current environment. A wiser man than I would have been wary of further attempts at sarcasm - either my own or perceived attepts at sarcasm by others. Not so your intrepid correspondent.

The big faux pas for the day came a few hours later, when a customer entered the store to return a pair of ski pants he had bought his girlfriend for christmas. His first mistake was to buy extra large pants for his partner. I am by no means a successful wooer of women-folk, but even I know that this is a complete rookie error. Gentlemen, when buying pants for your ladyfriends, always err on the side of flattery. Buying pants in a smaller size will assure your partner that she is slim and beautiful in your eyes, that to you she is a slyph, a waif, a stick-insect in desperate need of a sandwich. If the unavoidable fact that she is a few sizes larger than a stick insect means that she needs a bigger size of pant then that's fine. You can blame pant manufacturers, the curvature of space-time, a socialist plot. It becomes you and her against the whole world of skinny folk and their cruel judgements. Buying her extra large pants is demonstrable proof that you think she's fat. For those folk dumb enough to think that matters, this is a cardinal offense.

But I digress. My customer has bought extra large pants, and now he would like to return them, because unfortunately they are too small for his partner. So far so good. Except he then makes a comment to the effect of "Buying your girlfriend extra large pants makes her think you think she's fat. And then they didn't fit. It's never a good look when you make your girlfriend cry on christmas day."

Don't judge me too harshly too early, but upon hearing this I laughed just a little. This has nothing to do with me being a bad person. Rather, it's because this genuinely seemed to be a comment made in jest - a kind of black humour at the customer's own expense. Of course, reading that comment in the cold light of day might not paint it in a funny light, but recall that this was a gentlemen who had just come into a shop and said this to a complete stranger. If I had to return a pair of pants after christmas I might well make a similar quip to the shop attendent for a cheap laugh. And if I had managed to simultaneously suggest I thought my partner was fat while demonstrating that she was too big to be extra large I certainly wouldn't then explain that to the shop staff. That's the kind of embarrasing detail that folks typically keep to themselves. In my defence, I didn't even think it was that funny. Yes, the concept was pretty good but I thought the delivery was a bit off. My laugh was more one of politeness than genuine mirth. But it turned out that his delivery was off because this wasn't a good joke in bad taste. Instead it was a hearfelt description of a potentially ruined christmas involving a sensitive and unhappy girlfriend.

What ensued was a short, but deeply awkward, silence. Fortunately, my boss was also present in the conversation and managed to distract the poor guy by trying to find some bigger pants (there weren't any). I spent that time being very interested in some extremely important things on the other side of the store.

Communication here is a veritable minefield. Not only do I have to ensure that I actually say things I genuinely believe, but I have to assume that people who say things to me are also being sincere. Given that Canadians are the kings of sarcasm, I can't see this ending well.