This situation brings back negative memories for me when I experienced a similar situation. I once worked a seasonal desk job that frequently had hours of slow / down time. Hours. I had no problem with this whatsoever… I often brought a book or surfed the Dope or wiki or whatever.
Unfortunately I had a supervisor who, whenever she and I were working together, just the two of us, she could not handle the down-time by entertaining herself. She would pull up a chair to my desk, two feet away from me, and sit…and… I don’t know, look at me expectantly.
Now, I can handle this for brief periods; she was a perfectly nice person with an interesting enough life in her own right, so I could bring up chit-chatty questions for a bit about, “how are things? how is your s.o.? what’s the latest with your dogs?” etc. I can do this little polite play-acting just fine… within limits. It is not in me to be rude or abrupt. She would respond to this for a few sentences and then we’d just… run out of things to talk about.
And she would continue to sit. See, she wasn’t one of those can’t-shut-up talkers – in fact, she was normal in that respect; as near as I can tell she just wanted to have company. But she didn’t offer a whole lot to keep the chat going. So at every conversational lapse I would furiously mine the depths of my brain for SOMETHING to bring up (it would have to be a totally new topic, out of the blue, of course) from my life, to talk about. I’m not thrilled about getting too terribly personal with co-workers anyway, although I trusted this woman and didn’t mind her knowing little things about my s.o. or whatever. So I would bring up a new topic in a totally natural, conversational way, and could valiantly keep things going for a bit.
Whenever the [always very superficial] conversation waned, I would make little attempts to turn to my desk, adjust my book like I was about to start in again reading it, fiddle around with paperwork, etc., just in an attempt to subtlely send the message that I really needed to get back to doing my own thing; but she never really took the bait.
I can’t begin to describe how much I hate-hate-HATED this whole scenario every time it happened. I loathed it. In fact, this is very cathartic just writing about it. In no particular order, the issues that bother(ed) me about it are:
(1) HATE small talk. HATE IT!! Did I mention I hate small talk?
(2) This person was a perfectly nice woman, who was not otherwise weird or annoying. In fact, she was kind - hearted and altruistic (e.g., she frequently baked yummies and gave them to family, friends, co-workers, anyone who crossed her path, because she loved to do it). Her putting me in this position, however, bred a small degree of resentment, and even disdain.
(3) One practical problem… when we are out of things to say, we end up, literally, looking at each other. With nothing to say. This is hard (for me anyway) to do - the looking at each other thing; so I had to constantly do some evasive maneuver to avoid eye contact. It didn’t seem to bother her, I guess… eye contact with nothing to say. Who knows, because I could never stand to sit there with uninterrupted silent eye contact for more than about three seconds. This led to:
(4) feelings of self-loathing on my part, because I was so craven about not making eye contact - when in fact, perhaps just a steady gaze when there was nothing left to say perhaps would have prompted her to decide to get up and find something to do.
(5) Right or wrong, I have always had a certain contempt for people who cannot freaking tolerate alone-time or who cannot entertain themselves while alone. I just look down my nose at it. To me it smacks of immaturity and an “entertain me” mentality.
I know this is a bit beyond what the OP is talking about, but I had to get that off my chest - it happened for a couple years in a row at this one job, and I’d never verbalized before just how much it bothered me.
“Oh man, you don’t even know, I just found out Grandpa Frank strangled Nana Gertie to death.”