Sometimes I worry that my subconscious makes me do ridiculous things just so I can get a good column out of it.

After just three days living in a new, much chillier, part of Australia, I had a classic clueless blow-in mishap. I acted on advice to park in the underground parking area of a well known store pedalling various goods at rock bottom prices (for the sake of disguising it, let’s just call it schmay-schamrt – at the moment this establishment is selling novelty cat socks for a dollar fifty so it’s in your best interests to work it out!), which unbeknownst to me, locks up of an evening. Not just some shaky security guard who is counting down the days to his retirement draping a chain across the exit, but sturdy rolladoors, bolted window caging and sternly-worded signage aimed at deterring robbers and unsavoury folk. There was no sneaking in there.

So when I returned to my sweet ride, I was fairly unhappy.

Luckily, I was out having a dirty pub feed with my new colleagues and one kind soul offered to pick me up for work the next day once we realised my automobile had been inCARcerated (Yes, I DO I feel like Jesus after that ripper play on words).

The next day I was picked up as promised, however there was already a passenger in the front seat. As I buckled up, names were exchanged. But you generally follow up an exchange of names with more words unless you’re wearing a Bogart-style fedora and trying to establish that this will be a tense relationship.

I found out that it is slightly awkward trying to talk to someone when an ergonomically-correct configuration of foam and steel is creating a physical barrier between you and the subject of your attempt at conversation. The seat creates a barrier more difficult to overcome than a simple cradle of upright comfort and safety; it creates a conversational barrier. In the world of communication research, we would call this noise (I think, but just go with it – I mean there wasn’t much actual content we had to memorise in COMU, but the communication models made up about 70% of that. And COMU and/or JOUR students didn’t go to uni because they could learn facts, but because they could pull things out of their arse and manage to pass these nuggets of confusion off as knowledge). “Noise” is what prevents the message from being interpreted by the receiver as the sender intended (yeah, that truly complex notion took me four years to learn. No wonder my tertiary institution has effectively labelled my degree as worthless by proposing to discontinue it). Noise can be literal noise – such as the sound of a foghorn or an irate crowd bellowing abuse at a 16-year-old referee – or it can be the distracting fact that the sender spat while speaking, that the receiver has “hey there, blimpy boy” stuck in his head, or the sender’s thick bogan accent. Essentially, noise can be almost anything in this context.

In the context of my car meeting, the car seat was a noise so loud it was deafening. When I first meet someone, I like to establish the fact that I am equal to a male, so I do what the menfolk do: extend my open hand for a firm and brief, but meaningful handshake. Unfortunately when you attempt to pull off a manoeuvre like this in the close confines of an automobile, it can be quite tricky. The verbal greeting was followed up by an uncomfortable few seconds of trying to meet each other’s hands and failing – kind of like when you’re walking in the path of another person, and you both try to dodge each other by going the same way and then there’s that awkward dance-laugh you both do before scurrying away to deny to yourself what just happened. Except I didn’t scurry off to bury my shame in my internal quicksand of repressed memories – not yet anyway.

I decided that, given the handshake was out of the question, I would pat the man on the head. Now, clearly my subconscious was looking for another Dannielle-humiliates-herself-again story because I deemed it appropriate to PAT A COMPLETE STRANGER ON THE HEAD. The worst part is that I didn’t even debate whether this type of contact would be well received, or even make any sense. I instinctively reached over the head rest to fondle this poor guy’s skull cap. It was like my brain had thought about this situation in advance and prepared a Plan B option to revert to in the case of a disallowed handshake, and it was very, very drunk at the time.

The move was met with silence as we drove onwards. I sat there completely nonchalant about the whole exchange, thinking that I’d just nailed another encounter with a human. I was almost proud of myself. It wasn’t until about two minutes later that I realised what a huge mistake I had made. I am glad the head-petted stranger was riding shotgun, because the expression my face upon this realisation would have been quite confronting had it been visible to the other occupants of the vehicle.

I got out of the car in a daze, stunned by what had just transpired. I like to think that normally, I wouldn’t find replicating the way you interact with a dog as a suitable means of establishing warm feelings between myself and a stranger. So surely something in my brain was fishing for column fodder. No one can be that bad at people, can they?