[...] When it was my turn I looked him in the blurry eyes over the top of my glasses—I am tall but not as tall—and offered a closemouthed smile that I hoped conveyed my skepticism about the experience we were about to undertake together, wagering that he probably hated his job and if he didn’t then it wouldn’t matter if I had expressed skepticism because I would abandon my interest in him and move on to someone who also believed organized pub crawls were but one of innumerable humiliating excesses of desperate post-globalized economies. He gave a closemouthed smile back, not perfunctory but not innuendo either, and because I returned just then to an upsetting experience from college in which I used my twenty seconds at the front of a line to try to banter with a renowned author while he signed my copy of his novel, I retreated without attempting any little comments. [...]