There are mistakes you can recover from in life. You can send an email to the wrong person, forget somebody’s birthday or confidently walk into a glass door and eventually rebuild your reputation.
But there is one social catastrophe so devastating that recovery feels almost impossible: waving enthusiastically at somebody who was never waving at you in the first place. It normally begins innocently. You’re walking down the street, wandering through a shopping centre or sitting somewhere minding your own business when you notice a person in the distance looking vaguely in your direction. Suddenly their hand goes up. Instinct takes over. You recognise neither the face nor the circumstances particularly well, but apparently none of that matters because your arm has already begun moving. You wave back. Not a subtle little acknowledgement either. Oh no. You’ve committed. Full hand. Possibly even a smile. Maybe a cheerful nod thrown in for good measure. For one beautiful second you believe you’ve successfully completed a normal human interaction. And then the person walks straight past you and embraces somebody standing six feet behind.
There is a very precise moment when the brain discovers what has happened. Your hand is still in the air, but the social purpose for having it there has disappeared. You are essentially standing in public with one arm raised for no reason whatsoever. You cannot simply lower it normally because that would amount to admitting what you’ve done, so an emergency disguise operation begins. The wave must immediately become something else. Perhaps you were scratching your head. Yes. That’s good. People scratch their heads all the time. You smoothly redirect your hand into your hair and begin rubbing the side of your scalp with an intensity that suggests you’ve suddenly developed an extremely localised dermatological emergency. The problem is that nobody scratches their head by first extending their arm fully towards another human being and moving their hand enthusiastically from side to side. It fools nobody. You know it. They know it. Somewhere behind you, the person who was actually being waved at probably knows it too.
Another popular recovery technique is the fake stretch. Your waving hand continues upwards until both arms are involved, at which point you pretend you’ve simply decided that the middle of Tesco is an excellent location for some light upper-body mobility exercises. This is even less convincing. Nobody browsing breakfast cereal suddenly starts doing warm-ups beside the Weetabix. Nevertheless, you persevere because the alternative is admitting that you’ve just enthusiastically greeted a complete stranger. You stretch your shoulders. Perhaps rotate the neck. You’ve gone too far now. You’re basically conducting a small yoga class in aisle six, but at least nobody can conclusively prove there was a wave.
Sometimes the situation is worse because you recognise the person. Or at least you think you recognise them. They look familiar from a distance, which is enough for the social part of your brain to make a catastrophic decision before the visual part has completed proper identification. You raise your hand. They look at you. You smile. They continue looking at you with absolutely no indication that either of you has ever met. Now there isn’t even another person behind you who can explain the mistake. You’ve simply waved at a stranger because their haircut vaguely resembles somebody you worked with in 2014. At this point you have two choices. You can accept the embarrassment and continue walking, or you can perform the truly desperate manoeuvre of looking beyond them and pretending you were waving at someone else. This requires extraordinary acting skills because there is nobody there. Nevertheless, you glance confidently into the distance and maintain the wave for another second, creating an imaginary friend whose only purpose is protecting your dignity.
The reverse situation is hardly better. Sometimes someone waves at you and you don’t respond because you’re confident they must be waving at somebody else. You’ve learned from previous trauma. You’re not falling for this again. So you ignore them. Then they get closer. Still waving. Now they’re smiling too. Eventually they shout your name. Brilliant. This one actually was for you. You respond approximately twelve seconds late with the panicked enthusiasm of someone who has just realised they’ve ignored a perfectly friendly greeting. “OH! HI!” you shout, waving far too aggressively in compensation. Now you look arrogant and unstable. The other person thinks you deliberately ignored them until they were forced to provide verbal identification, when in reality you were simply trying to protect yourself from another false-positive waving incident.
Car waving introduces an entirely different level of complexity. You’re driving along when another motorist raises a hand. Are they thanking you? Do you know them? Are they warning you about something? Is there a speed camera ahead? Did you leave your petrol cap open? Before you’ve processed the possibilities, you wave back automatically. Then you spend the next thirty seconds trying to identify the car in the mirror. “Who was that?” The passenger doesn’t know. “Did you recognise them?” No. Perhaps they weren’t waving at you at all. Maybe they were adjusting the sun visor. You have now exchanged what appeared to be a warm greeting with somebody simply attempting to stop sunlight entering their eyes. For the next five miles you find yourself checking passing vehicles in case you’ve accidentally greeted a neighbour, colleague, distant relative or complete stranger in a Ford Focus.
The most humiliating version, however, occurs when your mistaken wave is enthusiastic. A discreet raise of the fingers can be written off. That’s ambiguous. Perhaps you were adjusting your glasses. Maybe your hand simply needed some air. But an enthusiastic wave involving the whole arm cannot be legally disputed. You have made a declaration. You have announced to everyone in the immediate area that you know this person and are delighted to see them. Some people even add a little bounce or open-mouthed smile before discovering the terrible truth. There is no emergency head scratch capable of concealing that. You’ve crossed the point of plausible deniability. All you can do is lower your arm, continue walking and accept that for the next forty-seven seconds you will be thinking about nothing else.
And that’s the strange thing about these tiny social embarrassments. Nobody else cares. The stranger you accidentally waved at has probably forgotten about it before you’ve even passed them. The person behind you certainly isn’t going home to tell their family about the remarkable case of the incorrect wave. Yet your own brain carefully saves the event in permanent storage so it can be replayed unexpectedly at 11:47pm three years later. You’ll be lying peacefully in bed when your subconscious suddenly whispers, “Remember when you waved at that person outside Sainsbury’s and they weren’t waving at you?” Excellent. Thanks for that. Wonderful contribution. You now get to relive the entire thing in high definition while trying to sleep.
Perhaps the only sensible solution is to stop waving altogether. Nobody acknowledges anybody unless identification has been independently verified by at least two reliable sources. Eye contact will not be sufficient. A full name must be provided. Ideally photographic ID. Until then, hands remain firmly below shoulder height. It might make Britain slightly less friendly, but it would prevent thousands of people every year from having to pretend they suddenly needed to scratch their heads.
Of course, none of us will actually do this.
Tomorrow you’ll be walking somewhere and notice movement in the distance. Someone will raise a hand. Your brain will make an immediate decision before you’ve had time to investigate.
You’ll smile.
You’ll wave.
And then you’ll notice the person standing behind you.
At which point, for reasons nobody will ever believe, you’ll suddenly have an incredibly itchy head.
