The Fast Walker

The whole work/office/corporate existence can be a bit Seinfeldian at times. If you’re lucky enough to have a close friend at the office, you inevitably end up having ongoing inside jokes about the woman in the next cube over who always overprojects while talking about distinctly nonwork-related issues on the phone, or the way that one manager always gets those beads of sweat on his upper lip or the fact that the new lady in your department eats Wasabi peas for lunch every single day.

I recently became fixated on one such Seinfeldian trait of someone here at our office. This guy -- I’d put him in his early 30s -- started here a few months ago. Truthfully, I didn’t know much about him at all. I didn’t know his background, his role here, his personal history, anything other than what he looked like and this one fact: He is the fastest walker I’ve ever seen. w

I don’t know how you describe with words how fast someone walks, but believe me, he’s a fast walker. Last week, I happened to spot him out in the parking lot. He was probably 30 feet in front of me, walking in the same direction as me out towards our far-off automobiles. I decided I would try to gain ground on him -- with the only rule being I wasn’t allowed to run. Now the thing is, I must be close to six inches taller than this guy, so you’d think this wouldn’t be all that hard. I kicked it up to second gear and tried to close the gap between us. I was still falling farther behind. I kicked it up another notch -- trying to cling on to my self-imposed no-running rule -- and I swear, he just kept stretching out his lead on me. on me. Now what’s remarkable is that he had no idea we were ever having this fast-walking competition. He was just doing his normal fast-walking thing. And I -- trying my darnedest -- couldn’t gain an inch on him.

Now, I’d have to categorize myself as an “ambler” or perhaps a “saunterer.” I’m no speed walker, for sure. But I wondered, can you tell things about somebody’s personality by how they walk? Are fast walkers somehow different -- maybe somehow superior -- to saunterers? Why would anyone want to walk that fast all the time?

Clearly, this fascination with the fast walker was a bit strange and unhealthy. I figured it was time to embrace my obsession and get to know what the fast walker was all about. I decided I would interview him.

I emailed the fast walker, and in a somewhat cryptic way, asked if I could set up 15 minutes to talk to him. He responded in the affirmative promptly. Turns out the fast walker is a pretty fast emailer as well. We agreed to meet Friday morning at 10.

Now, one thing that needs to be explained about Monster is that when a meeting is scheduled for 10, you can rest assured that it won’t start until at least 10 past 10. It’s just a given that meetings absolutely do not, under any circumstances, start on time. In fact, arriving at a meeting on time more or less assures that you will lose the time that could be used if you stayed at your desk for an additional 10 minutes. But given that I’d never dealt with the fast walker before and that he’s only been at the company for a few months and might not have fully adhered to the always-at-least-10-minutes-late-to-all-meetings rule yet, I decided to show up at 10 on the dot.

When I got to our meeting place, he was waiting. Mind you, this means he arrived at our meeting before the actual meeting time. Indeed, it was starting to look like there was something very different about the fast-walking sort.

I’ve got to confess: I was expecting fast walker to be intense and a bit brusque. I was figuring he might end up a bit on the annoyed side that I asked him to take time from his day so that I could interview him, all because I was intrigued by his accelerated walking habits.

But I was pleasantly surprised by the fast walker. Turns out, he’s a totally friendly guy. And while I expected to find him a bit humorless, he ended up having a funny streak. He, in fact, described himself as “intense but funny underneath it.”

But other than that, he more or less matched up to my expectations of what a fast walker might be like. He was a double major in German and economics at Ivy League Dartmouth, and he just recently received his MBA at none other than Harvard.

When I asked him whether he was Type A or Type B, he said Type A, but then went on to give me a brief dissertation on the history and shortcomings of the Type A/Type B personality test. He said that on a scale from 1 to 10, he’s an 8 on the ambition scale. He also said he has a tendency to be a bit on the blunt side when interacting with people. And he openly admitted to being a nervous type. Oh yeah, and he was a management consultant at one point in his career.

In other words, it turns out that if you’re judging people by silly things like how fast they walk, you may well be on the money.

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