An observation

At work I've noticed that sometimes you'll kind of know of someone for a while, maybe you've emailed with them a few times or talked on the phone, but you've never met them face to face. This is extremely common in my large company. Sometimes I feel like I work with people I don't know more often than people I do know! But then you meet the person face to face and all of the sudden you're like best friends. Now that you "really know" the person you'll ask them to do more favors for you - like "oh hey, it was great to meet you the other day! Can you pull me this set of data? THANKS!!" Not quite sure how friends = favors, but it seems to. I have done this before, and just yesterday I met someone new and today I had two new emails from her asking me to do a few things for her (we had only emailed a handful of times before we met). Interesting.