Conversations.

I spent the better part of my early twenties wondering why people speak.  In a literal sense.  It was a question that I'd put directly to people.  "Why do people speak?"  I still spend an inordinate amount of time with the question.  But there's a certain type of conversation that I seem to have repeatedly that sums up a lot about NT behavior for me.  I'm really not sure how to go about explaining this, so I'll just offer an example.
 
When I worked at Bix in San Francisco, there was one server there who fancied himself a bit of a player.  He came into work one night talking about the girl he had taken out of his local watering hole right before it closed the night before.  Was talking about how hot she was.  Seems he'd struck up a conversation with her right before the bar had been about to close and decided to take her back to his place.  Had a great night, he said.  One of my coworkers asked him whether or not he'd gotten the girl's number.  You going to try to keep it going, Jon asked?

No, this guy replied, I don't want to know her.  I don't have any respect for the sort of person that would go to bed with someone that they've known for only twenty minutes.

What sort of respect do you have for yourself, then, I asked.

This is the sort of shit that trips me up on a regular basis.  

It's kind of like going to Vegas.  You walk down the strip in Vegas and they advertise losing odds.  Our slots pay out $0.97 on the dollar.  You know that $0.90 of that is going to one winner.  You know that it's a losing proposition, yet you play anyway.  And they make assloads off of those machines.  Vegas wouldn't exist but for the fact that if you're playing against the house, the odds are stacked against you.

There are exactly two games that one can play in Vegas where the player can have edge.  Poker and Blackjack.

In Blackjack, you can gain edge by counting cards.  The casinos will do everything in their power to make sure that you can't do that.  They do it by running six shoe decks.  And reshuffling when there are two decks left.  Even after that, if the casino suspects that you are still able to count the shoe, you are politely told that you are not welcome to be there or welcome to come back later.

In Poker, the only reason you can gain edge is because you are never playing against the house.  The house merely rents the table to you and provides a dealer.  They don't care who wins, because they make money on every hand.  You gain edge only if you have edge over the other players.


Despite this, do you know where the casinos generate their revenues?  Slots.

This idea (hope) that the standard rules don't apply to oneself is almost a defining characteristic of NT behavior for me.  The idea that I am exempt from my own standards (respect someone that goes home with someone after 15 minutes?)   But quite a few NT narratives seem to violate themselves.  And that's not something I'm very good at losing myself in.