Yeah, people aren’t worth figuring out.
It seems that some people just don’t get that other people exist. The interrupting thing is one thing I notice a lot (I’ve got a few of those I deal with at work). It also manifests itself in things as simple as getting on and off the elevator; I see so many people that just start to get on the elevator as soon as the doors open, and are always surprised that other people are actually getting OUT of the elevator. “Other people exist,” I want to say to them.
“There are two kinds of people in the world - those that listen, and those that wait for their turn to speak”.
Well, sometimes people do not wait for their turn. I think that as well as not realizing they are being rude, the problem is a lack of listening skills. if you are a recovering interrupter, you know how important listening skills can be.
I second the response along the lines of “can you please let me finish what I am saying?”.
I had a boss that would sit and bullshit for hours at a time. If I gave him a signal that I had a question and then patiently waited I might wait forever. I got to where I would just interupt with, “sorry, one quick question”.
Sometimes it’s because you keep talking and talking and talking and oh my God how can you keep talking without taking a breath and I’m going to forget the point I wanted to make about what you said five minutes ago.
If one person interrupts you, then they’re probably rude. If a lot of people do, you’re a droning bore.
Hi, I’m swamp princess and I’m an interrupter. I’m actually very shy, introverted, and not an attention whore or someone who’s callous to other people’s feelings at all, so I’m trying to overcome this.
1 and 3 here are big factors for me, but there are also a couple more, based on my own experience:
-
They’re bad at reading social cues, so they have a hard time determining on the fly when it’s their “turn” to speak. This can be especially hard when more than 2 people are talking - e.g. you politely wait for Person A to finish, you tentatively open your mouth, and Person C starts talking because you waited half a second too long, trying to be sure Person A was really finished, and missed your chance. So the next time you don’t wait that half-second, Person A wasn’t finished, and congratulations, you just interrupted them!
-
They come from a family/culture where everyone interrupts everyone all the time, thus they see it as not rude or noticeable in any way, just normal conversation. The requirement that everyone wait in silence while one and only one person speaks at a time can actually feel uncomfortably rigid and artificial to them.
My mother for example is The Queen of Interrupters, and if you’re not willing to interrupt her, you will NEVER get a word out in our house. So between my family and friends I grew up seeing this as the natural way people talk together, outside of very formal settings like a debate or a job interview. I never had a problem with this throughout school, college, and several jobs, but now I’m in a full-time job in a more “high-class” setting and it’s becoming an issue. Particularly with one coworker, who has a tendency to talk for very long periods, and if I try to ask a question or get clarification or even involuntarily say “mm-hm,” she rolls her eyes, sighs dramatically, flouncingly turns her back and ignores me like a misbehaving puppy. I’m now petrified to talk to her at all, which I do not feel is a constructive way to work towards mutual communication. I’m sure I will eventually acclimate to the different communication style but it’s unfortunately not an overnight process.
This is a big part of it. I grew up near New York City, where the tendency is to consider it rude to just sit there and let the other person talk! It means you’re not listening. To interrupt a bit from time to time is to show the speaker that you’re engaged with what they’re saying, that you’re making an effort to find and express points of contact between their experience and your own.
I’ve lived in Kansas for a decade, and my wife has to remind me sometimes that this is not the general tendency out here.
I have a colleague who has a very annoying tendency to interrupt people. She’s from the deep south, so it’s not a New York thing.
Part of it seems to come from the hardscrabble upbringing she’s told us about (at length), and reactions to it. It’s as if politely acknowledging that she’s interrupted someone unintentionally, the way most adults do - “I’m sorry, please go on” - would be an admission that she’s their inferior. She is indeed, however, able to control her interrupting when conversing with people she’s *actually *subordinate to, which makes it harder for me to view it as something she can’t help.
Another part of it seems to be a narcissism born of cultural ignorance. If she met a Holocaust survivor, she’d interrupt to tell them that her family had sad stories too: “One time, there was a flood, and my grandma lost all her ‘rheumatism medicine’. She was really broken up…”
Everyone in my husband’s family, save my husband, interrupts. It’s a large family, and although everyone is now an adult, they still “jockey” for my MIL’s and each other’s attention during family gatherings. They all speak at once and loudly, and the surefire way to get everyone’s attention is to pretend to take umbrage to something recently said because you suddenly become “angry” and “everyone” will rush to your side.
My husband is the black sheep. He cannot follow multiple conversation threads without a meltdown, so he becomes very impatient whenever we attend a family gathering. Sometimes he’ll get into an argument with another family member. Everybody will then “tsk tsk” at him for starting trouble :rolleyes:
I remember the etiquette advice columnist Miss Manners (Judith Martin) once got a letter from a six-year-old, asking if it was ever okay to interrupt her mommy. Miss Manners said, “Yes, if it is important. Here are some examples of important things: Mommy, the kitchen is full of smoke. Mommy, there’s a policeman on the porch.” Etc., etc.
This reminds me of interrupting’s other cousins - the “corrector”, and the “out-doer”.
The “corrector” waits for you to commit to something so they can offer a correction, no matter how mundane to the discussion. “I was at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, I think that was during Bush I’s presidency, and we were going to…” (interrupter-corrector butts in) “No, that was during the Clinton years”. No one cares about that trivial fact - it is not germane to the thrust of the discussion!
The “out-doer” again waits for you to make a commitment in the discussion so they can rifle thru their own experiences to find something that trumps what you did. “That train ride to Barcelona took us 22 hours, because…” (interrupter-out-doer then says) “Well, I was on a train for 25 hours once!”. A simple “oh” would have done as well to let the speaker know you are paying attention.
And, yes, I do agree that when someone is droning-on without stopping to take a breath, you need to find a way to take them out at the knees. Sometimes a hand gesture in the form of a ‘T’ (as in “time out”) can work, but on a conference call one needs to be more assertive.
When my boyfriend interrupts me (which is often but getting better) I say " but enough about me, let’s talk about you". It shuts him up pretty quickly. Obviously that’s a situation where the person I’m talking *to *is interrupting. As far as a third person barging in, I simply don’t acknowledge them until my current conversation is finished, or at a natural break. A withering look is helpful also.
These two posters may have nailed what the problem is.
Every word of this post speaks for me too.
My mother does it because she thinks she knows what I’m (or my dad, or my sister) is going to say. Of course, most of the time she’s wrong, but it doesn’t stop her. It drives me fucking nuts.
I know two people who are horrendously bad about interrupting whoever is talking, whether to them or to a third party.
Both of them are talkative people, self-focused, and both of them have very few relationships where they can talk freely. My guess is that they are filled with all kinds of things they want to say, and can hardly wait for the speaker to pause or inhale so they can start dumping out whatever has occurred to them.
Often it’s so startlingly trivial it’s kind of offensive – you will be saying “I got a new job,” and they will cut in to say “I saw a red car yesterday.”
Occasionally, I’ll interrupt people to ask them a question because experience has shown me that, if I need an answer from them quickly, it works better than any alternative.
If I leave a post-it note on their desk they typically won’t read it or they’ll forget about it.
If I send them an e-mail they typically won’t read it, or something else will come up to prevent them from replying to it.
If I ask the person next to them to pass on a message when it’s more convenient they’ll typically forget.
And finally, and here’s the kicker, if I need a person for something important, and I choose not to interrupt them and, as a result, don’t get the information I need in time for me to do the thing I need to do, when they find out that the thing hasn’t been done they will invariably say “Oh, for Christ’s sake, why didn’t you just interrupt me?”
Interrupting is bad, but not getting shit you’re being paid to do done because you’re scared of interrupting someone is worse.
That said, I never interrupt someone if they’re on the phone (it’s just different) and I never interrupt anyone unless I think it’s important.
Paula Poundstone once claimed to have been such a person. According to her, had Martin Luther King told her “I had a dream” she would have cut him off saying “I had a dream too! Only in my dream…”