Last night I was riding the subway from Kendall to Harvard, headed to Grendel’s Den for sandwiches and the weekly meeting of the free culture crowd. There was a girl in a green jacket seated opposite where I was standing, and we played the “we are both looking at each other but not quite making eye contact” game for a while. I smiled, she smiled, and started conspicuously fidgeting with a camera.

Like most “smiling at strangers” things it left me in a fairly cheerful mood, but I found the camera-fidgeting to be particularly amusing in retrospect. It’s up there with pulling out a leather-bound notebook and writing in it or flipping through it in “gestures you make in the hopes someone will comment on it.” Because nothing is more charming than the painstakingly obvious, “So, uh. You take pictures?”

Memo to people who hope cute strangers will talk to them: drawing attention to your artsy accessories will probably not help.