It seems to me that there are people in the world who you are just supposed to meet. Now, I’m not talking about your nearest and dearest friends, significant others or such, just the occasional stranger who strikes up a conversation.

Yesterday, while riding the bus home from work, I encountered such a person. He started the conversation with some topics that, finally, seem to be on everyone’s mind - the economy, energy, government corruption.

During the chat, the conversation turned to the price of electricity, and I mentioned that I understood the electrical market. He was then curious.

Now, before I go further, let me say that curiosity is the coolest thing in the world. You don’t have to be smart to be an intellectual; you only have to be curious. It is my belief that most people are not curious because their curiosity has been destroyed by formal education, but some of us, it seems, survived with our curiosity intact.

(On a side note, I credit my survived curiosity to having attended private school, for which I am eternally grateful to my family)

Anyway, this fellow is not a techie, and not a marketeer, and had little to no basis for understanding the issue. “One sentence,” he said, “why is electricity so expensive?”

Having given my one sentence, he was able to drill down through layer after layer with new questions, each getting a one-sentence answer.

In the end, maybe five questions and less than five minutes later, he got the basic idea.

Those of us who are techies have a tendency to go on at great length and into excruciating detail about the things that light us up. As such, when we have an important point to make (think DRM, net neutrality, etc.) We put our audiences to sleep and bury them in unimportant details. Far better to give the one-sentence answer, and let your listener ask the next question.