Several detailed recaps of the minutiae of your weekend should do the trick.
“… so I hit snooze again. I keep telling myself I should turn off the alarm on Friday nights but I always forget! Haha. So anyway, where was I? Oh right, so I hit snooze again and then the next time it went off I hit snooze again, but then I decided to get up anyway, so I turned the alarm off and got up. Now, on Saturdays I prefer to have Raisin Bran for breakfast but I ran out this week and hasn’t been to the store yet, so I had to have Rice Krispies, which have always seemed like more of a Tuesday breakfast to me, but it was slim pickings this weekend in my kitchen so I went with them anyway, which obviously was a mistake, because now what am I doing to have on Tuesday?..”
Great! So, did you have as much trouble as I did navigating all that roadwork on the highway on the way here?
Great! Say, isn’t it something about that <current issue in the news> <sports event> ?
Great! Say, I’m about to have a meeting this week about the Henderson account. You used to do the bookkeeping for the Jameson account, right? Would you say we’re likely to run into the same problems with Henderson?
Honey, you’re surrounded by people who have no plans for the weekend. We’re relaying on you to keep us entertained on Monday mornings. So, how was *your weekend?
Honey, please stop asking. I usually just relax on the weekend and while I love doing so, it doesn’t make for good stories. I’d rather you just say “so, what’s up?”
The replies here are interesting. Especially those who think it’s personal (and a slight intrusion to ask).
I recently changed groups at work, moving from a fairly talkative bunch who shared weekend plans and events. “What are ya don’ this weekend?” was a normal and expected conversation. I moved to a group that, while friendly, does *not *talk about this stuff. It took me a few weeks to figure this out. I wonder if the OP’s coworker simply considers this polite (and expected) conversation. For those few weeks, I’m pretty sure I was an irritant to my co-workers. I did however, clue in that no one was asking me the same questions (and backed off quite a bit).
My WAG is this is due to my new group averaging about 25 years younger than my old. I assume a lot of their social interaction is through text/IM/etc. and less face-to-face. As an experiment, I spent one week walking to my desk without greeting or visiting with anyone in the way (this was not petulant, I just wanted to see what the norm was). No one said hello, or goodbye the entire time. I wasn’t being singled out, this was just their normal mode. They enter their cubes with no hellos, and leave with no goodbyes. I’ve adjusted to their norms, but I wonder if the OP and co-worker have a large age difference?
The OP’s coworker isn’t just asking questions - she’s keeping track of the answers and offering unsolicited commentary.
“You never have any plans on the weekends.” The coworker isn’t just curious - she’s holding the OP accountable to her standards. Now, that may make some people feel all warm and gooey and cared for, but it makes some of us feel otherwise.
“There is a coworker who keeps asking me about my plans for the weekend, and then on Monday she’ll ask me what I did during the weekend.” - That implies to me she’s not really listening to the responses. If she was, wouldn’t she say “So how was the movie?” or “Did you have a lazy weekend after all?”
But I get asked so much about my weekends (as part of normal smalltalk), I wouldn’t even notice if the same person who asked me on friday asked me again on monday.
All we have so far is that the coworker has said this once.
The OP did say he/she thought there was contempt in her voice when she said it, but with just that to go on I don’t see enough to get annoyed about, and I think any drama would be premature.
As you undoubtedly already have realized, there is no polite way to get someone to stop idle chit chat. You either have to take the rude/sarcastic way out, as some have suggested, or suck it up and play along. And you really don’t want to burn a bridge over something so minor.
Sometimes when people ask me what I did that past weekend, I’ll say (honestly), “Not a damn thing. It was great!”
You don’t have to burn a bridge. You can discourage the kind of conversation you don’t want by not responding or by giving minimal responses, and encourage work-related conversation by responding with more enthusiasm on professional matters.
Monday - Make something up. Some kind of ridiculous story. You invented a perpetual motion machine, but it got out of your lab and now you have no idea where it went. You climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, both peaks (maybe save that one for a long weekend). You installed a 20 camera motion sensing security system in your garden to catch that THING that’s eating your kale. You won a pretzel eating contest in Lancaster PA.
I can’t imagine how this could be a big deal. Just say you hung out with some friends and got some rest/ran some errands. It’s not interesting enough to encourage further conversation but it won’t make her comment that you never do anything.
