I’ve known some people like that, and it drives me crazy. Maybe even more than the droners. There’s one co-worker in particular who often does it. I’m always tempted to be snarky in reply but rarely am. Like he would say something like “the file was on John’s desk, can you believe it?!” and I would want to say “yes, I can definitely believe it, it’s not that remarkable of a story.” But I usually just try to ignore it.
I wish it were socially acceptable to just hold up a hand and say, “This conversation is not of mutual benefit. Let’s bail now and save ourselves the incipient trauma.”
In my experience, these are typically just people who honestly don’t get the social cues. In some cases, it’s because they are socially naive or ignorant, sometimes it’s because they have some sort of disorder, but often it’s just because they’re so passionate about whatever they’re talking about, they just plain miss them or rarely just plain don’t care if you’re not passionate too.
Usually, I’ll play along a little bit, often it will fix itself. After a certain point, I’ll just try to find a kind way of bringing it to an end. If the gentle nudge doesn’t work, I’ll be blunt. If the blunt doesn’t work, I’ll just leave or do whatever I’d otherwise be doing. And if that doesn’t work, then I’ll be mean, but that’s rare, and it’s usually only necessary for people who just plain don’t get the cues and, thus, don’t even really see it as mean anyway.
Perhaps your nephew is a clone of my sister. She’s really a lovely person, but she starts talking about one thing (in excruciating detail) and somewhere along the way a tangent occurs to her so she goes down that road for awhile, until a couple of other things come to mind so we follow those, and so on. Every 20 minutes or so she will recognize that she has been doing all the talking and she asks me about my stuff, but really, after a lifetime of that (the first 18 years of my life living with it every day) I just don’t have that much to say.
Anyway, I recognize it’s some emotional need for recognition or something, so I just sit back and wait it out. Like I said, she’s a sweetheart in every other single way.
Roddy
OP piping up again. Last year I was a conference with two other people I work with. I knew both of them to be chatterboxes but this turned out to be an understatement.
It is natural to think I am exaggerating, but I swear hand to God that I am not. They spent the entire car trip there talking–both of them, at the same time. Literally non-stop.
At dinner, I had one on one side of me, the other on the other side of me. Each spent the entire dinner addressing me. At the same time. Non-stop.
Again, I should be exaggerating here, but I mean the above claims in the literal sense. And they are true. It was mind boggling.
I know two of these. I’m still friends with both of them so I may be a glutton for punishment. M is a colleague in my former office; he is the king of odd tangents, as if he has to follow every odd thought that crosses his mind to its conclusion. There are several times I called him specifically to tell him something, only to find I couldn’t get the words out over his verbal diarrhea. Each time, I either had to practically shout it over whatever he was saying, or just give up and email it to him.
S isn’t quite as talkative, but if she tells me some brief story one time, I shudder - because she’ll mention it again on the next dozen phone calls (at least), no matter how minor or boring the story is. She also has the habit of leaving messages on my cell phone just telling me she “just called to say “hey””, with no other information. Yes, she knows that cell phones have caller I.D. I finally downloaded an app that allows me to prevent certain people from leaving messages.
I so wished that always worked. You carry on with what you are doing, they start talking to you again. Or they get all miffed and talk around you about how horrible a snob you are.
That’s why everyone is recommending that you leave. Unfortunately, at a job, you often can’t. No, you have to do the much worse thing, which is catch them after work and talk to them about their behavior. Yuck!
Just curious: How long ago did your mother die?
My neighbor’s boyfriend has Asperger’s (he’s in his 50s and pursued a diagnosis when he read about people with it and recognized himself) and he can talk endlessly about his favorite topic, the provenance of imported collectable rock LPs. But he will change the subject if asked.
ETA: Post deleted because I decided against it. But this.
I’ve been to family things where I knew I wasn’t going to be able to take the family politics shit for very long. So before I get out of my car, I figure how much I can take and set the alarm on my cell phone to ring after an hour or so. “Sorry, I have to take this call”, chat away to nobody getting increasingly concerned, and then apologetically excuse myself because “Something came up.”
A cell phone ‘set on vibrate’ can work too.
I kinda love people like this. I’m horrible at small talk, so if all i have to do to hold up my end of the conversation is occasionally murmur, “uh huh,” or “yeah,” that works out pretty well for me.
There are a couple of other teachers on my hallway that are like this. If they stop by my room after school and get started, they will stand in the doorway and rattle on for an hour easily. And the whole time I’m trying to look busy (because I actually AM busy!) to give them a hint to wrap it up and move on. But they just don’t get it.
Ha! This is exactly what my mom does when her insane sister calls. She’ll be preparing dinner in the kitchen and not paying the slightest attention to her sister’s psychotic ramblings about gov’t plots to poison her and burglaries of her home (burglaries in which the burglar took nothing but a couple of half-burned POS candles), instead just throwing her the occasional “Yes Linda” or “Uh huh”. It’s really hilarious.
I think a lot of these people do get it - maybe some have a condition or lack social training etc. But most seem (IME) to just open the stream of consciousness part of their brain, open their mouth, and let the noise fall out. I can handle it if the person is oblivious, but when there’s intent , I will be blunt.
I’ve had a few friends like this too. We would talk about her problems mostly and what I could not stand was that she would not listen. She would talk about a “problem” she was having, and we would talk a out “solutions” to this problem and she seemed to get it. Very next thing that came out of her mouth was a complaint about the same damn problem. This happened over and over so much that I told her I can’t be her damn therapist anymore. She seemed to get it after that and we got along a lot better.
My grandfather was a wonderful, wonderful man but basically kept up a running monologue all the time, including dinners, car rides and phone calls. My dad said when he had met him decades before he had been really quiet. My mom is now doing something similar with phone calls. They both had hearing loss and it seems to be more comfortable to talk than listen.
This post made me realize that one of my coworkers hasn’t been seen in a while. Weeks? A couple months? He is so obliviously obnoxious that I guess everyone is just glad he’s not around because I haven’t heard anything about why he isn’t. I would have heard if he left or got fired so I’m guessing it pertains to one of the medical issues he never stops talking about. Anyway, if he comes to my desk and starts a monologue, I send an IM to a friend to call me and pretend to have a work related conversation until he goes away. It can take several minutes before he will finally wander off.
I left before a coworker’s wedding reception a few years ago because there were two work-folks tables and he was at one and the rudest person in the universe was at the other. I refuse to subject myself to that stuff anymore. (And the rudest person in the universe retired two weeks ago!)
MIL is like this. She’s so self obsessed that she can’t stand a conversation about things she’s not familiar with. My friends and I will be having a fun conversation on my Facebook wall about something she doesn’t know anything about and she’ll post in the thread with something like “Did you get my email about Dad’s birthday?”. Shuts the conversation down as everyone feels rude resuming as though she hadn’t posted, but no one else has anything to say on the topic of whether or not I got the email and so it just stops there.
My neighbor’s husband told me he found his wife talking to herself. He asked her who she was talking to, she said she was talking to me. I’d left 2 hours previously to his asking.
My sister does this too and she has narcissistic personality disorder. It’s why I haven’t answered a phone call from her in years; I just text her back. It makes me feel like a jerk, especially because she always says how she wishes we spent more time together but she really is extremely frustrating/boring to be around.
Perhaps we can all start a support group. We can call each other and not say anything at all…