The first week of January 2016 I traveled to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. It was only my second CES ever. My first was seven or eight years ago.

I’m not sure that Las Vegas is the best place to get the new year up and running. The tech industry seems to think it is.

The company I was working for had booked me a room at the Luxor, which is the hotel-casino that, from the outside, looks like the illegitimate child of a pyramid and a horny disco ball.

When I deplaned at McCarran, it was obvious that everyone in the airport was there for CES. Lots of backpacks, and virtual maps, and foreign accents, and index fingers pushing the bridges of eyeglass frames back up the lengths of oily noses, etc., etc. Oh, the narrowed, nearsighted eyes of nerds! Eyes ruined by decades of comic-book reading, staring at computer screens, playing video games, etc., etc. What beautiful eyes they have, truly.

As I waited in the incredibly long taxi line at the airport, I realized that splitting the cost of a cab from the airport to The Strip would make more fiscal sense for me. Yes, I am now the kind of person who uses terribly grown-up-sounding expressions like “more fiscal sense.” No, I don’t even recognize myself sometimes.

“Excuse me,” I said to the man standing in front of me in the taxi line. He was wearing an expensive-looking cardigan in a terribly casual way. I envied him immediately. When I wore cardigans, I somehow looked like an unemployed substitute teacher.

The man looked at me over his shoulder. “Sorry to bother you, but are you here for CES?” I asked.

He said that he was. Of course he was. We were all here for CES. Duh. “Then are you by chance staying at the Luxor?” I asked. “It’s a long shot, I know.”

The man winced. He squinted at me for me for a few seconds. Then he said, with great reluctance, “I am, in fact, staying at the Luxor.” He had a gentle English accent.

Only later would I comprehend the full extent of the man’s wariness in this moment. He was an Englishman who, presumably only moments ago, had stepped off a plane in Las Vegas, a.k.a. Debauch City, U.S.A. Me? I was an American who was approximately the same height as the fabled Frankenstein monster and who dressed like an extra from the 1978 movie Grease. To make matters worse—again, I’m guessing at the Englishman’s thoughts here—not only did this Frankenstein monster talk, but it also had somehow guessed the exact hotel that I was staying at.

Seeing no graceful way out of this, and also being handicapped with English genetics (over-politeness: -4), the man agreed to share a cab with me to the Luxor. Of course he agreed. Then, as soon as he agreed, to my complete surprise I suddenly became suspicious of him. What if this oddball waits in the McCarran taxi line every day? With his grey eyes and his fancy Harrods cardigan? Hoping that a sad, confused Frankenstein-type with lots of photos of his two adult cats on his iPhone asks him to split a cab?

What if this guy’s a hustler? A serial killer? Or worse: a hustler-serial killer?

The Englishman shifted from foot to foot. I shifted from foot to foot.

The two of us stood together in silence, obviously uncomfortable to be in the situation that I had put us both in. The taxi line shuffled forward.