Over the past three weeks, I’ve spent no more than a total of 4 hours with you in the same room. Most of that time was spent on work related issues. Why is it that I aleady know that you:
a) are half black and half jewish on your mother’s side
b) are circumcised :eek:
c) grew up in the St.Louis ghetto
d) survived several drive by shootouts between rival gangs
e) feel that god has a plan for you
f) were a tank commander in the marines
g) learned IT while in the military
h) married an asian woman with a 13 year old daughter from a prior marriage
i) your mother lives with you
j) your wife and mother don’t get along
k) you have two young daughters a year apart in age
l) are remodeling your house
m) your contractor doesn’t have a truck to carry cement bags necessary to pour your basement floor so you have to do it
n) your wife doesn’t give you a moment’s peace
o) your wife thinks you don’t earn enough
p) your wife torments you day and night with new chores
q) are considering seeing a marriage counselor
r) feel unhappy in your relationship
s) Blah, blah, blah, FUCKING BLAH!!!
I DON’T FUCKING WANT TO KNOW YOUR SAD LIFE STORY!!!
It’s not my fault you married a fishwife. It’s not my fault you can’t say no. It’s not my job to be your therapist or best friend or sympathetic ear. You are wound tighter than a fucking halyard winch. You are going to snap and take out everyone in the office with that gun you keep under your bed and every time you walk into my office I get the tingling sensation down my spine that your are going to start your killing spree with me.
Please, just shut the fuck up and find someone who cares. Get help you loon. :mad:
Oh I get that a lot. You either have to make your excuses politely and leave, or look upon it as flattering that someone feels comfortable enough around you to confide in.
I usually try to direct the conversation to interesting parts of their life. Most people’s life histories are interesting up to a point just beause they’re different from your own. If their present life is boring and whiney, maybe ask them about where their grandparents came from. Free oral folk history.
Some people are shit boring though, no matter how much your probe and redirect their conversation.
If you are female (are you? Sorry, I seem to have this gender identification problem here), he is probably attracted to you and is looking for sympathy. “My wife doesn’t understand me, she treats me like dirt, yada yada yada…” is a pretty common workplace pickup line. I don’t know what to tell you, even noncommittal grunts seem to encourage guys like this…
I think a pre-emptive strike is what’s called for here, QuickSilver (who is a boy, by the way). You go to work tomorrow, and just go off on this motormouth. Tell him pretty much what you typed in the OP, except at the top of your lungs. Or something along the lines of, “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT YOU STILL DON’T SHUT UP!”
The dude’s a consultant and reports to me on a project that is winding down. I guess he’s looking to be extended for new work. The guy is smart and seems like a hard worker… when he’s not sharing his mind numbing life traumas.
I’d slap the fucker into silent stuppor but I hear that’s not a currently popular method of resource management.
I’m also starting to think it’s just me that sends out some kind of subconcious lunatic attracting signals. I asked the new manager of another outsourced team how he liked the DC area (he works in Richmond) and he told me how he used to travel a lot and that work took it’s toll on 2 previous marriages and he was on his third and with regular church attendance and self imposed limits on travel, this marriage was now in it’s 8th year.
WTF? I was just making polite conversation while waiting others to join our telephone conference. Why do I need to know about your past marital woes? Just tell me how much you like DC and the Mall and then talk about sports or the weather. I don’t want to know about your personal life. I certainly would not dream of telling you the smallest detail about mine. We just have to work together. We don’t have to be friends and share our feelings. Don’t be such a fucking skirt!
Thank you for comprehensive use of the English language, including expressions such as “fishwife,” which does not deserve to sink into oblivion under the all-purpose and thus less descriptive “bitch.” Use of thoughtful language seperates those who value comunication from those merely over-enamored with the sound of their own voices.
Do you have one of those faces, QuickSilver? Perfect strangers come up to you and tell you their life stories if you so much as look at them? I do. I can be reading a book on the bus or sitting on a park bench and someone (with plenty of completely free seats around me) will sit down next to me and start telling me about their children, their marriage, whatever. A middle-aged man once sat next to me and told all about how much he enjoyed being a Catholic and then very helpfully predicted my future – I would be a social worker and then a judge, to help underprivileged children, because I had a kind face, wouldn’t hurt anyone EVER, and my name means “princess” and that’s what princesses do, help people.
Middle-aged men, young children, and old ladies. My god. They are drawn to me like a moth to flame. Maybe I should dye my hair fah-laming pink. That ought to keep them away.
Ooh, maybe you could start water-training him. Every time he says something that’s TMI, you could squirt him with a spray bottle and say, “Bad kitty!”
I’ve always had this feeling that I get this worse than most people, so I’m sympathetic. I’m not sure what it is, exactly. I’ve learned a few skills for use at least in avoiding it in public places. Maintain deliberately closed body language; if someone sits next to you, don’t even look up. When that fails, and someone (it particularly happens on the bus) starts talking to me, and I can tell they’re a talker, I just tell them I don’t speak English. “Lo siento, no hablo inglés.” They’ll look confused, respond with something, and I just shrug, look helpless, and say, “No le entiendo.” It works.
NO NO NO NO NO!!
I’ve colored my hair all sorts of crazy colors. Thing is, bright blue hair is just an easy way for strangers to come up and have a conversation with you. “Nice hair. Did you color it yourself? What did you color it with? My mother is dying of cancer, and my goldfish committed suicide last week, and my wife keeps chasing me with a knife. Say, is that an interesting book?”
No, keep everything about your appearance neutral if you want to avoid these people. I’ve considered cultivating horrible body odor for avoiding talkative strangers, but that seems like an extreme solution.
Y’all suffer from the Curse of the Invisible Forehead Sign- a mark that compells total strangers to share the sordid details of their lives.
Trust me, I have it too.
For some reason, people feel drawn to tell me all their problems-on airplanes, buses, or just walking down the street.
I was once at Barton Springs in Austin, a giant spring fed pool-just one of many bodies sprawled on the hill, catching some rays.
A man entered the pool area dressed in slacks, shoes, and a long sleeved shirt, which was completely inappropriate attire for August in Texas.
Which was my cue to duck my head and buy my nose in the book I was reading while my brain chanted “No eye contact, no eye contact.”
He walked all the way around the pool, stepped over myriad bodies to squat next to my towel and announce, “I just did two hits of Acid and need somebody to talk to for the next couple of hours.”
Righto, Ralphie. :rolleyes:
Now that sounds like a thrill a minute.
There’s not much you can do about it either except move to the country and isolate yourself from humanity as much as possible.
I did but the UPS man and Fed-Ex ground still like to regale me with stories about their lives.
“. . . like the other day the wife says to me, ‘How come you never empty the wastebasket in the bathroom?’ and I told her, ‘Woman, I do plenty around here . . .’”
Quicksilver cooly picks up a spray bottle.
" . . . and I don’t see you lifting a finger to help my mother—"
FFSSSSTTT!QS calmly spritzes him directly in the face.
He stops talking, completely confused, paralyzed by the weirdness of the situation. QS goes back to his paperwork.
AGAIN! It fucking happened again this morning! :mad:
I’m getting my brakes done early this morning at a friend’s garage and another customer comes in. My buddy introduces me to his customer, I politely shake his hand and before I know it:
his wife of 34 years passed away over 2 years ago
they got married with 3 months after the first date
he’s semi-retired
he’s a big Ford fan and owns three
he served in the army and drove his first ford in the 50’s across the US
he damn near told me about each fill-up on the journey
he is dating now
he’s had an almost two year relationship with the new woman
she wants to get married
he’s got a big 5 br house
which he has a hard time keeping clean
his housekeeper of 12 years charges $50-60 to clean the place
he can’t bring himself to move or get rid of his wife’s things
his son visits him often
And the only thing I said to him to prompt this conversation was “Hello” and “Yes, that’s my car. I’m very happy with it.” He managed to get all that stuff out while my friend was taking the car for a test drive around the block. :rolleyes:
It’s me. It must be me. What I can’t understand is why. I don’t even like people.
It’s because I make contact when I say hello, isn’t it?
There was a girl I went to high school with who liked to share and was a pathological liar, to boot. Me and one of my friends used imitate what it was like for people to meet her for the first time: “Hi, I’m Anne Marie, and I was raped by four guys. When I was in second grade. In the hallway at school. They didn’t even get in trouble. So I hunted them down one by one and killed them. I scooped out their hearts. With a spoon. So it would hurt more!” etc.
