I know a few people who give an hour by hour recap of how they spend their time. They start out by saying “I woke up at 6 and watched the news. Then I made breakfast at 8:00–I had pancakes and a banana, I only like organic bananas–and I used the maple syrup my sister-in-law gave me last Christmas. Then I took a shower and got dressed and went to the grocery store. I needed cheddar cheese but I don’t like the cheese at Hy-Vee, I go to Aldi which is the same cheese but $2 cheaper…” On and on. If we do something social together, like have lunch, they’ll give a recap of the event that I was at! “Oh, that was a good lunch, I had the California steak with honey mustard dressing and Pat had the hamburger with mushrooms and it only cost $7.95…” I even have a co-worker who will say stuff like “I saw that movie back in 1989. It was a Tuesday and I was wearing my blue sweater and it was raining…”
Is this just goofy behavior or a sign of something deeper? And yes, I know I need new friends and co-workers!
I’ve known people like this. In my experience people who have nothing else of note going on in their lives tend to focus their energies either on daily routines or other things that can be easily renumerated, like meals.
People who have a bit of OCD may also do the same thing.
I’m not a big talker, and these people fascinate me. I think it is a combination of needing to fill empty air with talking, and not realizing at what level of detail a story needs to be told. It’s not mental illness. Is there a chance that you are a quieter person and so the folks around you may feel the need to fill the void?
I work with one, an otherwise-nice and giving person. I suspect part of it is not recognizing social clues from the listeners that they are bored or disinterested. My particular person does not have any other noticeable social abnormalities.
I don’t think it’s a sign of mental illness either, but I would like to know why people tell stories like that. My sister does that, too - when she’s telling a work story, she likes to give us all the names and details of everyone involved. I will never meet most of these people, and I don’t care about their names or details - the story wouldn’t lose anything by being edited to, “So, last week at work, my boss came in and started yelling at the accountant…” rather than the extremely long and detailed version that we usually get.
Is it just that some people have no sense of how much detail to put in a story?
:nodding: I thought of that after I’d posted my initial reply to this. My aunt and MIL are both guilty of this behavior, so much so that they don’t even realize that nobody is listening until somebody gently points it out. Even then, they sometimes still don’t get the hint. There is probably a psychological component to it.
It’s a combination of talking too much, obsessive attention to minutiae, failure to understand how to appeal to their audience’s interests, failure to accurately read other people’s body language, and poor story-telling skills.
Does she also sometimes give identifiers which don’t identify anything? In Spanish, coworkers and classmates are all your “mates”; my mother will often talk about “your mate” as if I had to know which of my several-hundred former coworkers, classmates, sunday-school-mates etc she’s talking about. Then she’ll talk about someone I’ve never met and likely never will, and she describes what they were wearing and every single relationship she knows for them or for the references she’s giving (“I was with Betty, the retired nurse, who used to work with Dr Smith before she worked with Dr Barnard, who was married to Sue’s sister, and as you know she doesn’t like doctors, and she’s the neighbor of your mate’s mother, she was wearing a black skirt and a cream blouse and she had coffee with too much milk, she really shouldn’t have that much sugar…”)
I took a class at Indiana University Bloomington in fall semester 1980 in Balentine Hall room 210, and professor Stewart (Anthony, not Lewis) directed us to our text book (Introduction to Psychology, a Journey through the mind… Random House Publishers, 1979) page 247 where it distinctly noted that this is perfectly normal behavior.
I have the ability to remember every little bit of the day I am living. An old boyfriend would have me do it just to see how long he could endure it.
Being able to do it is okay, but actually doing it in front of people is not so good. As someone once told me “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”