I play the monosyllable game but this is indeed jerkish. I do not do this. It’s my response one time per conversation then answer the damn question. Similar but not quite the same thing.
I’d still enjoy talking with Bob though. I do enjoy the game and it’d be like playing handball with a wall.
I’ll do the “that’s not what I asked” thing a lot, often because the questions I’m asking are intentionally leading either them to a known (to me) conclusion or I need those specific questions answered to come to my own conclusion. Just today, someone’s furnace was broken. In trying to diagnose it over the phone they answered all my questions with ‘it fired up and then shut down’, not understanding that I need to know if they actually saw fire (or just heard motors) and when, specifically, it shut down.
My pet peeve is when people don’t ask the questions that they want the answer to, often times beating around the bush for some reason. For example, someone will call me at work, ask if we have widgets in stock. I’ll put them on hold, go look, come back and tell them that we do. Then they’ll ask if we have ‘a lot’ of them, I’ll put them on hold, see what I have, come back and tell them we have 600 in stock and they’ll say ‘okay, great, I need about a dozen’. Well, just ask me if we have a dozen, I know we have that many. Woulda saved me a trip.
A long time ago I started responding to ‘do you have a lot’ with ‘how many is a lot to you?’. It saves me a lot of time.
He’s still better than my brother…
Me: Are you coming to the party on Saturday?
Brother: I have a gig on Friday night.
Me: How’s your heart condition?
Brother: A lot of people have an aortic aneurysm.
Me: How is your wife doing?
Brother: I bought her a new Cooper Mini last week.
Me: Has work been busy for you?
Brother: My office moved from Newport News to Virginia Beach.
At least these answers qualify as real information, if not directly responding to the questions.
Exactly. My brother is noted for telling you all sorts of interesting things…but not directly answering your question.
I see that on LivePD a lot.
Cop: Do you have any weed on you?
Suspect: I’m just coming from work.
Cop:Have you been drinking today?
Suspect: I was just sitting here minding my own business.
Customer: Is this the Krusty Krab?
Patrick: No, this is Patrick.
Granted, some of them are lying/stalling, but I think a lot of them are answering truthfully and don’t realize the cop can’t read their mind (ie I was at work, therefore I don’t have any weed on me).
I am stunningly disappointed that no one has identified the best non-elaborated answer to a question ever:
Mostly, the problem is that YOU don’t know how to ask questions:
for example,
is a perfectly correct answer to THAT question.
Maybe if you had asked for directions to Jenny’s house, you would have gotten a more satisfactory answer?
The personality quirk at play here is people that ask a bare minimum question, yet expect a verbose answer.
(But not too verbose!!.. and no guidance given as to where the line for hat is drawn)
To be maybe a bit of a devil’s advocate here, it seems to me that ‘in Salem’ might actually be a reasonable preliminary answer.
Maybe your friend thought you were trying to decide whether to go to Jenny’s, and that your answer to ‘in Salem’ might be ‘Oh, I’m not going to drive all the way to Salem for this, too far from my place’ – in which case a list of detailed directions would probably have fallen into the category of ‘why is this person going on and on giving me a lot of information I’ve got no use for?’
My wife complains about this all the time, only via email, which is more egregious in my book. She’ll write something like:
“I can do either Monday or Tuesday afternoon and we can either meet at the restaurant or I can pick you up. Let me know what works for you.”
And she’ll get the reply:
“Sounds good.”
Or she’ll write:
“What day do you want to meet?
Shall I bring the papers with me?
Where would you like to eat?
Will you have time to go to the store after lunch?”
And she’ll get the reply:
“Thursday”
Not just with one person but pretty universally. She’s about given up on the human race.
I had something similar with a friend once. I was in college on one coast and she was back in my hometown on the other; I was trying to set up plans for us to get together when I was home for Thanksgiving. I kept emailing her to nail down the details and she kept responding to my questions with “sounds like a plan!” No it doesn’t, I wanted to reply, possibly in all caps. But when I finally picked her up it hit me how we were coming from completely different places. She’d had a baby recently and was living with her parents, siblings, and extended family. She was in school but off for Thanksgiving, and she wasn’t working. So her whole week was just taking care of the kid, and there was always someone else at home who could watch him for a bit while she ducked out. I was thinking from the perspective of the young (mostly white) parents I knew, who were always missing out on fun stuff because they couldn’t find a sitter or the sitter cancelled last-minute. But she came from a large (Latino) family where everyone sticking close and pitching in was the norm. She probably thought I was weird for being so hung up on whether we were getting together at 3 or 3:15 in two weeks.