I mean, it is legitimately a symptom of Inattentive-type ADHD, which is a type of ADHD that’s more common in girls and women and generally underdiagnosed compared to the Hyperactive/Impulsive type more common in men and boys. It features internal distraction more than externally observable hyperactivity, so you get viewed as “spacy”, forgetful, not detail-oriented, disorganized etc. “Chatty” is a very common descriptor because it’s easy to meander and forget what you were even talking about because your mind is bouncing around so much. Did she also come across like she wasn’t listening sometimes? Like she just wasn’t “there”? Like if she was talking she could meander on about nothing but if someone else talked unless she was really interested she couldn’t always form a coherent response? That’s another big sign.
My FIL does this - even pausing during his narrative to say “But that’s not important” or “It doesn’t matter…” before rambling on. All we can do is wait. He gets his feelings hurt so easily, and, frankly, at 89, his mind isn’t what it used to be. The tangents drive me crazy, but I expect I may do something similar some day…
Man, I’d love to know how to do this, but I doubt there is a good way. Unless you are a superior to an underling - or to a work equal, and you can say, “I don’t have time to the back story - what is the important point? What do I need to know/do?”
Our neighbors do this all the time. They are VERY nice, but VERY boring. It can be pleasant to have drinks with them occasionally - catch up on the families and the neighborhood. But they both consider themselves raconteurs. And they HAT to be interrupted. The seize the conversation, and go into a 5 minute story, which you know where it is going about 20 seconds in, and you know it won’t be particularly interesting. They get bent out of shape even if someone offers a brief interjection/observation - as happens in most social conversations I participate in.
What makes it worse is that my job involves trying to elicit information from often uncooperative, untruthful, or ignorant people. To move my workload, I have to focus on efficiently eliciting the pertinent information. After a long day of that at work, it can make my head explode to come home and have my wife say “P and K are coming over for drinks!” So I do my best to just sit there with a smile on my face…
I guess I do it sometimes. My husband will ask a yes or no question, and I try to explain that it’s not that simple, so he cuts in with, “That’s not what I asked.” It’s rude, so I give him the yes or no that he wanted, and let him find out about the caveat on his own.
At work there are clients who ramble so much, I throw politeness out the window. I hold up my hand (STOP) and say, “I do not need to know any of this background material”, then I ask questions that can be answered succinctly.
When encountering rambling monologues at work one can frequently get a general idea of where they’re headed to early on. What I like to do is politely interrupt to ask a question that I think will likely bring them to that point more directly. More often than not the ‘point’ is in fact close to what you think it will be. This works some of the time, but there are some people in this world that will not willingly cede the conversational initiative and will tell their tale in full no matter how we try to short circuit that. I’m convinced the reason such individuals insist on a long narrative is that their message is intended to be absorbed on an emotional level.
My wife has been known to tell rambling narratives on occasion. Say for instance, she gets ticked off at a cashier at the grocery store, and there’s a dispute about how items got rung up. You or I might say “that cashier at the store was a total dimwit. She refused to ring up the sale price even when I showed her the store ad.” But the missus might relate that information beginning with the quantity and type of items she purchased, how long the line at the register was, and proceed to give a blow by blow ‘I said and then she said and then I said…’ transcript of the interaction. I now understand the reason she does this and feels she can’t possibly leave out any details is that she is trying to get me to understand how her current emotional state came to be, and in order to do that she feels I need to see all the steps of the way that led there. Omitting steps in that tale would lessen the emotional impact. So while I’m inclined to short circuit rambling monologues at work, I recognize that at home the relationship is different and it’s quite necessary to allow one’s partner to express their feelings, even if it takes quite a while to do that.
This is my first wife. After we split up and I had remarried, we’d still need to talk about stuff (on the phone) for the kids. The Missus would observe the 20-30 minute conversation without actually listening in. After the call she’d ask, “So what’s up?” and I’d giver he a 30 second summary, or sometimes, “I’m not really sure.” That was never really satisfactory for her because wow I sure had been on the phone a long time. It bothered her to think I was keeping that part of my life intact and secret. But then one day, The Missus had a phone conversation with the Ex. Afterward she told me, “Now I understand.”
I’m one of the worst offenders.
One of the least offensive ways of telling me to become more succinct is “Can I have the elevator statement first?”
It does depend on the circumstances. My husband does this. When asking him a question for which I need a quick answer - and not a 60 page dissertation of an answer, with background, and exceptions - or a discourse of some theoretical future state, I say “In 200 words or less, I need to know…” I taught some of his coworkers this trick. He’s self aware enough to know that he doesn’t give short answers, so the reminder that you are looking for succinent helps.
When its a long rambling story I tend to just listen with just one ear - especially at home because as Cardigan said, the relationship is different - unless I need to do something in which case I interrupt with “I need to.” Sometimes, I need to run to the bathroom - which is a great excuse to end a conversation and it isn’t like most people will follow you and keep talking. With cell phones set to vibrate “I need to take this call” works.
The most annoying thing my husband will do is talk at me. He needs to work out his thoughts verbally, and since he works from home, I’ll be the mannequin he directs his voice to. Its taken two years of working at home, but I’ve actually stated “sometimes you just use me to talk at. When you are doing that, I’m not really listening, and I’ll continue to look at my phone, or read, or count on my knitting…if you really need me to listen and need my input, you need to tell me, because I might not pick up on it. I don’t mind being talked at - I understand that is part of how you work things out, but I really don’t need to dedicate mental cycles or attention to it” He agreed that often he is just talking at me, and me treating it as background noise was fine, and he’d get less annoyed when he talked to me and I wasn’t listening under the belief I was being talked at again.
I have a friend with a loud voice and a tendency to dominate conversations. She’s married to a man with a loud voice and a tendency to dominate conversations. They are both better either one on one, when they can hear themselves - or in really large groups - like parties - where its normal to talk to someone for ten minutes and move on. They are both horrible in small groups, where they need to respond to every statement or story - often with long rambling stories of their own. Don’t go out to dinner and sit next to either of them in a group of eight or ten - pick the other side of the table.
Dave Chappelle to the rescue!
I’m the opposite; for better or worse, I communicate in a similar fashion as The Man with No Name.
A person who reports to me specializes in storytelling. If you ask him a work-related question, he will tell story after story after story about his supposed experiences with the subject matter. I say “supposed” because I suspect most of his stories are highly embellished. His mouth will be going nonstop. And then, after 20 minutes or so has gone by, your question is still not answered.
Most of us now avoid going to him with any work-related stuff. So what does this guy do? He now goes from office to office, plops down in a chair, and will tell story… after story… after story about is supposed accomplishments.
(I now realize he doesn’t quite fit the OP, because he never gets to the point.)
Is there a function that could be enabled on a smart watch where when you tapped it in a certain way, it would make your phone ring? Then you could pull out your phone and say it’s an important call. You could either leave the convo immediately, or “reject the call” and say you need to respond to the call as soon as they get to the point.
One situation where I find it beneficial to be with a non-stop talker is in a social situation where I don’t really want to mingle very much. Like at some sort of work lunch or something. I sit next to the monologuer and then I can just nod occasionally without having to worry about making small talk.
I do this all the time. Someone approaches me and starts talking about something I do not want to hear about. I pull out my phone, look at the screen, say, “I gotta take this”, and walk away. I assume they either think my phone is on vibrate, or they realize I’m not interested in hearing their story.
My brother’s wife does this all the time.
She old me a long, incoherent story once. It turned out that the point was that she was incredulous that her supervisor told her she lacked communication skills.
I encounter this at work ALL THE TIME, and it leaks over to my personal interactions. My strong personal preference is that the respondent START OFF with the yes or no, and then FOLLOW UP with the explanation. Could even say, “If you insist on a yes or no answer, I say __. But let me explain…”
Different from long, rambling answers, what I encounter way too much, at work and elsewhere, is I ask a yes/no question, and am answered “blue”. :smack:
Like AHunter3, I am guilty as charged. But I think I’m pretty good at catching it. When I do I just stop talking, pause a moment, say (out loud) “Oh just answer!”, and say yes or no, left or right, or whatever. I unfortunately do that a lot.
On rare occasions the person I’m talking to will take the plunge and ask me to elaborate. Bad idea. As 3-CPO once said, “We’re doomed!”
It’s funny (to me, anyway) to see this suggestion. One: because I agree with the sentiment, and two: because ‘back in my day’ I would have said the same thing, except it would have been: “Can you give me the Cliff’s Notes version?”
This is why I’ll never work on the phones again. OMG, I swear some of the older clients used the brokerage firm I worked at as a substitute for a call in radio show.
30 minutes of rants about Obama and conspiracy theories and then they finally asked for a closing stock price, which they could have gotten from the automatic phone system.
I find that there is a difference between people who do it occasionally and people who do it all the time, and it is linked to your own point: the ones who do it all the time are what’s called mirados* in my dialect of Spanish, they ponder every social interaction interminably and to them every single human interaction is a social one. They’re so afraid of being impolite and thus pushing people away that they often end up pushing people away because the rest of us decide we’ve got better things to do with our waking hours.
My mother does the “talking at” thing’; I once pointed out she was telling me the same story for the fourth time in the same call, she said “I’m not telling you because I want you to know, I’m telling you because I need to tell someone!”, I said I’d just set the phone on speaker and hum and hem and when she wanted me to pay attention again she had to say my name. We’ve been doing it like that for close to ten years now.
I guess I need to work out some sort of code with my boss to let me pull him closer to the point. I mean, it’s not as if I don’t ramble up and down and sideways given a chance… 
But I think I don’t do it during business meetings!
- lit. “looked at” or “stared at”. They feel as if the whole world is staring at them, analyzing their every move, thought, word and gesture critically. This leads to being terribly indecisive because they second, third and n-guess themselves all the time, including about the words they just said.
Doesn’t work, I have asked questions that could only be answered “yes” or “no” and gotten rambling monologues as answers.