nice 
One of my best friends has been doing this at least since the age of 17.
Where I used to work, I had a lot of people making demands on my time. Just showing up at my desk for whatever - usually something that helped them, not me.
After getting sick of having my productive time constantly drained (usually five minutes of inane waffle with about 30 seconds of work stuff in between), I bought an egg timer that I kept on my desk. As soon as someone turned up, the timer would be flipped and they had three minutes of my time.
It seemed a bit rude, but people got used to it/saw the sense in it and it made my job so much more efficient.
Not just old people. My husband–who was 36 when I met him–firmly believes that the relevant information goes at the *end *of a paragraph. Grrrr.
I have a few people at work that do this. It’s insane. We’re not hourly.
It was one of those big yellow ones. You couldn’t get white ones because of the war.
Racist.
Yes, young people do it, though the incidence seems to rise with age. I’ve got two co-workers who are middle-aged, not elderly, that you can’t get to shut up to save your life. Even the simplest question is an invitation for them to ramble on for twenty minutes.
Below middle-age, the only people in my current circle of friends who do it are mildly autistic, or came from families with large numbers of siblings.
**Do elderly people realize how infuriating long rambling answers are? **
Yep, that’s why we do it.
ISTR reading somewhere that in old age, an inhibitory part of the brain atrophies, causing the elderly to often have a reduced sense appropriateness regarding public utterances. Couple that with a lifetime of accumulative hearing loss, and you end up with, for example, an 80YO guy in the audience at a commencement ceremony making loud remarks about the weight of someone on the stage.
I suspect this same lack of inhibitory ability also accounts for the tendency of the elderly to give rambling answers.
Another possible factor: some elderly are starved for attention. Their children live elsewhere, and owing to physical limitations they don’t see their friends/neighbors very often, so when they get an opportunity to bend someone’s ear, they take it.
It makes me crazy. I arrived for a haircutting appointment on time two weeks ago and had to wait, and wait, and wait. This little old lady kept talking and talking and talking. It is a tiny fucking waiting room and there is no way she could not miss the two of us sitting there waiting in line, but she just kept on jabbering, and the haircutter was too chickenshit to cut off her monologue. Finally I had to go. My haircut is just a wash and a trim and takes maybe 20 minutes, and I was already 20 minutes past my appointment, and there was still another man before me.
I don’t intend to be that kind of old person. I am going to be the snippy old person who says whatever she wants because she’s old, dammit. I will tell people when they are being idiots, instead of hiding it.
Grr. :mad:
It took me 35 years to realize that when my mother says “You remember her, don’t you? She’s…” THE ANSWER IS YES. JUST SAY YES.
Trust me, from a public service position, it is not solely a disease of the elderly. What is pretty exclusively a disease of old men, however, is that “young lady” thing where you have to laugh at their jokes for the next five minutes. Not “making conversation”, no, “being an audience”. Ugh, I hate that. And they think they’re sooooo cute.
Lots of young(er) people do this too. I’ve come to realize that people who ramble do not know they are rambling. Probably because no one has ever sat them down and told them.
I once worked with a woman like this. She was in her 60s at the time. Her anecdotes were never linear. She’d start off talking about her neighbor’s cat and somehow wind up telling you about the time she ran into an old childhood friend’s husband’s ex-wife at the grocery store. It was exhausting listening to her. And the thing was, every attempt to change the subject would just make it worse. Because she had a story for everything, no matter how tangentially related.
That didn’t help with my mom. Thank Og for cellphones and tunnels.
My FIL will throw all sorts of tangents into whatever he’s relating, only to add “But that doesn’t matter” before moving on. For example, telling about an experience and trying to remember the name of the other person who was there, someone we’d never met and someone who has nothing to do with the anecdote, other than being present. That doesn’t stop FIL from taking a trip down memory lane about the guy, or his car, or the funny hat he always wore, before declaring that it didn’t matter with a “I’ll just call him John” and getting back to the original story, which you’d have already forgotten. And you can’t say anything to him because the older he’s gotten, the more easily his feelings get hurt. So we smile a lot…
My aged MIL was/is like that. When I had a long drive home from work I’d call her and say “Hi, it’s me.” She’d launch off & I could switch off my brain entirely for the 30+ minute drive home. When my subconscious detected a slight gap in the flow of noise in my headset I’d say “Oh really?” & go back to Zen mode. 30 minutes later I’d arrive home & tell her I was sorry but I had to hang up to greet her daughter.
I am regarded as the finest SIL that ever lived. And I have no idea what, if anything, she ever said over any of the years I did this most workdays. Nor did I know at the time. 
Describes me perfectly.
For some elderly people, the visit to the local shop can be their only human interaction of the day. Those few seconds are precious to them.
I get this on occasion at work and it never works. It’s one of my workplace peeves when I say I know something and the other person proceeds to tell me all about it anyway. I might have a reputation for being crotchety because if I’m not in a completely relaxed mood (about half the time) I will become visibly agitated as I say “yes, I KNOW!”
And to the OP: it’s not just an elderly thing. Back when I did computer tech work, I would get it on occasion from young people who felt the need to vent about the world before they’d tell me what was wrong with their computer. There was one woman I still remember who called me up and proceeded to rant about falling down in her driveway that morning and detailing all the reasons why she was having a HORRIBLE day and on and on before she finally revealed that her computer wouldn’t boot up. Those are exhausting!
I know non-elderly people who do it.