Shut up! Shut Up!! SHUT UP!!! Morocco?!?

The BBQ Pit
21

I had a similar problem with a guy who, thankfully, left for a business boondoggle in Shanghai that left him so broke he can’t come back. Yes, in some respects, he was Shanghaied. But I digress…

Not only could this fellow not STFU, once he’d run out of ideas (and to give him credit, he could keep up a topically original, near stream-of-consciousness barrage of smalltalk, for remarkable durations) he’d recycle the old ones in a manner suggesting he’d completely forgotten we’d been over a topic 17 times already. This was especially troubling when he not only wasn’t feeling innovative that day, but some subject bequiled him, fixing his attention so that I felt like a moth pinned to a cork board whenever he’d launch in again. The thing that most fascinated him was my car, or, more specifically, that I’d had my car for a very long time, and it was still running.

“How your car?”
“What?”
“Your car, it’s running good?”
“Yeah, since yesterday it’s held up pretty well.”
“Honda is a good, good car.”
“Yep.”
“Toyota’s good car. I read they’re better than Honda.”
“Mmmm.”
“How many miles you got on your car?”
“Umm…well, what was it yesterday…ah, yesterday it was about 168,000 miles, so I figure it’s about 20 miles more than whatever that was.”
“Hondas great cars. They go forever.”
“Yes…they do.”
“You gonna get a new car though.”
“I suppose some day I will.”
“You get a Toyota or a Honda?”
“Well, I thought about what you said yesterday, but I’m still not ready to make the big buy quite yet. Maybe in a year or two.”
“You think a Camry better, or an Accord?”
“Haven’t given it much thought, to be honest. Not since yesterday, anyway.”
“You think you get to 200,000 miles?”
“I really can’t say for sure.”
“You’ll buy a new car before then. Maybe a Camry.”
“Maybe.”
“You like Accord better than Camry?”

I swear to fucking Og I would have that conversation almost verbatim two or three times a week for a month straight. He’d drop it for a month, maybe two, and then something would retrigger the obsession, and it’d come back, only stronger. It’s like his entire existance hung in the balance over the yin and yang of MotorTrend’s rankings of the two largest Japanese auto makers, and what, just what would I do when finally I must make the fateful choice between these opposite but nearly equal forces. On some days I thought I was going to scream. I’d have to excuse myself to take a leak, only I’d go into a stall, sit down, and just rub my temples with my hands to make the pain go away. I began to loathe the very sight of him. He would not stop talking to me, and our benches were adjacent, so I couldn’t get away.

I never had another person make me so miserable at work, and the terrible irony is he was so relentlessly friendly about it. I’d see his smiling teeth come at me like I was tied to a railroad track, and those teeth were the thing on the front of the locomotive that plowed buffalo out of the way. It was a smalltalk steam train bearing down on me, and I couldn’t make it stop, I couldn’t free myself. When more or less lost his mind completely and self destructed in his homeland, I was half disgusted for myself for the joy I took from his absense, and half ecstatic over the prospect of never hearing his voice again.

22

But don’t do it like that - everyone knows you have to burn the dog.

(Noise reduction headphones aren’t expensive, either. I got mine for around $25. You can keep them in your bag and use them around the house, too - things like lawn mowing, hedge trimming, weed whipping, watching sports with your husband - they should all be done with noise-reducing safety gear on.)

23

Do NOT tempt me :smiley:

24

You could try MY method: Grow to be 6’4" and 300+ pounds. I have to initiate almost every conversation I ever have! But it does save me from idiots like those mentioned in this thread. :smiley:

25

My husband has a coworker exactly like this. The main subject he’s fixated on with my husband is his “hot” sister (er, only if you like overbleached, druggie blondes with skin so overtanned it’s honest-to-god the texture and appearance of leather), to the point where he’ll ask during each conversation how his sister is doing, if she’s still hot (DON’T ask a guy if his sister is hot!), etc. One time, my husband said his sister was dead, and the guy just kind of stopped, said “that’s too bad, she was hot” but the next week he caught my husband again and asked the same thing. Try telling this guy that your car exploded and see if he remembers?

26

Unfortunately, I can tell you, some people just seem to be born this way. I have one child like this. Okay, she’s not even close to ten years old yet, but her personality is set: she sings to herself, talks to herself, demands attention without waiting for a reply and often without a pause at all, asks the same questions over and over and over and over without listening to the answer (if any manages to be wedged in), interrupts any ongoing conversation as if it simply did not exist…

I swear I am trying to break her of it. Right now we’re trying the ‘stop, look and listen’ approach: stop, look and listen to see if anybody’s talking before you jump in. It’s not working. She is simply oblivious. I mean, short of just up and smacking her to get her attention…I don’t know what to do (and I don’t do the smacking thing). I’ve tried everything, including banishing her from the room for infractions.

(Actually, my mom is something like this also. So maybe it’s hereditary. She carries on a running commentary in the car, from oh look there’s a cow in that field to gee, what a lot of blue cars on the road today, to I can never find a good radio station on. Gah.)

You may be looking at a poersonality type, which the person cannot help. But you’d probably have to talk to their parents to find out the truth.

27

Green Bean–does Mort look like THIS?

If so, we might have an explaination…

28

You’re one those OP subject people, aren’t you?

ADMIT IT!

ADMIT IT!

:stuck_out_tongue:

29

Any shrinks handy? This definitely to me sounds like a mental illness. It probably rates its own page in the DSM-IV. Social maladaptation loquacity disorder, or some such. Because you’d need to be a little bit out to lunch to disregard such obvious social signals, wouldn’t you?

30

It sounds like a mental condition similar to Asperger’s Syndrome (only without the knowledgable expertise in arcane subjects), or, given your input that he is on the verge of retirement, the beginnings of senility. He may even have suffered a mini-stroke which has damaged his personality.

Maybe you and your co-workers can approach your manager to encourage his retirement (perhaps by slightly sweetening the offer)? Does the motormouth do any real work at all, or is he just a pest all the time?

31

Well, he’s far, far away now, so I won’t get to try the explosion strategy. Thing is, a joke like that could’ve backfired on me. He might’ve found the exploding Honda Accord so exciting, so delightful, so fascinating maybe he’d never stop talking about it. Maybe he’d comb the web looking for cases of exploding Accords, and compare them to reports of exploding Camrys. This might factor majorly into his ranking of Japanese midsize sedans. He’d have to tell me all about it. Again and again, like it was the first time. I’d have to either quit or…or…

32

We have a guy like this at work, unfortunately he is one of the customers, so you cannot tell him to shut up and leave you alone. We like to foist him off on one another as an ongoing cruel prank between us.

He always gets me with, “hey, I’ve got a question for you.” So I pause for a moment and then the story starts. Something about jazz band drummers, his days in high school, his brother’s college major, laundry, the band Rush, and his work hours. 50% of the time, there’s no question. The other 50% of the time the question turns out to be, “know what I mean?”

33

From what little tiny bit I know about psychology*, and what little tiny bits I can gather about the people in question in this thread, I would cautiously hazzard a very speculative guess about the existance of personality disorders in some of these people. I wish someone would write a good book on how to deal with people who “Just Don’t Get It”[sup]TM[/sup]. (It could be out there, for all I know.)

There is generally some sort of… well, I could say “short circuit” in how these folks interact with other people. I won’t say that I never get abso-frickin-lutely pissed when dealing with people like this, but, yes, many of them have something “wrong” with them, and I try to keep that in mind. I also know that they have a hard time with cues that you and (hopefully, but not always) I can just get. I have had some (minor) luck with getting someone to pick up on cues, but I a.) have to be very, explicitly, extremely clear and consistant and b.) usually have the authority of a teacher to wield over them. Dealing with adults who are like this has (so far, and very luckily) been something I have not had to deal with.

34

We have a woman at work who does this. Unfortunately, her job requires her to stay at the nurses station at all times (except her breaks). She keeps a low toned monologue up all 12 hours–if not about the pts monitors and situations (the pts are on camera as well), but how many times the phone has rung, how it is now hot/cold at the station, what she wants for lunch, what she had for breakfast–I’ll stop now.
I have learned to just not respond, but someone will respond to her. God, it’s boring to listen to–and stressful as well. I can get up and get away from her, but sometimes you just want to sit in silence at the station and get re-focussed. Not with her around. Unfortunately, she’s really good at what she does, so there’s no hope there…
Some days I dream of duct tape.

35

I really don’t give a damn what his “condition” is. Before you think I’m just a selfish bastard, I better explain.

He has always been like this, in the almost 20 years I’ve known him, so it isn’t senility. He has always had “control issues” - you probably know the type, the kind who is always right, everyone who disagrees gets browbeaten and threatened, he loudly claims he can kick everyone’s ass, has physically threatened people several times in the past, and also bigoted, intolerant and borderline fascist. In short, far more trouble than he is worth. He does no work at all. This uber macho bad ass, healthy enough to threaten people, whenever there is work to be done, either has eye trouble, or his legs hurt or whatever.

The son of a bitch came up with yet more idiotic bullshit. I told him I wasn’t interested. He stormed into my cubicle telling me I will listen. Then he got 1 inch from my face, blew a rasberry and sprayed me with spit. Then he grinned and said “you want to hit me?”. I lost it.

So, I don’t care what his “condition” is, I just want him to shut. the. fuck. up. One day I will drag him out, if he doesn’t stop.

36

My mother is a motor mouth. When I was getting married I had a phone conversation where she was describing the process of picking out a mother of the groom dress. It started with breakfast, the weather, who drove her, what they had for breakfast, what that lady’s son did for a living, what store they went to, how far away they had to park, the cut of the dress, the color of the dress, on and on. Then finally she said “so I didn’t buy it”. By this time I just lost it. “You spent 40 minutes describing the dress you DIDN’T buy!!” argh.

37

A court reporter I used to work for had a motormouth mother. He told me once that when he was in reporting school, he’d call up Mom, then sit down to his steno machine and use her monologue for speed practice.

38

[QUOTE=SteveG1]
I…The son of a bitch came up with yet more idiotic bullshit. I told him I wasn’t interested. He stormed into my cubicle telling me I will listen. Then he got 1 inch from my face, blew a rasberry and sprayed me with spit. Then he grinned and said “you want to hit me?”. I lost it.

[QUOTE]

So, um, where’s the manager during this? Are you documenting? Recording? Get a webcam in your cubical and surreptitiously record one of these events for management to see? Send the file to everybody in the office, from the top dog on down?

Geez, I would at LEAST be documenting.

39

Oh, come on, you can’t end a story like that with “I lost it.” and that’s it. What did you do? How did you lose it? Do you think you can take him?

40

Every year seems like I have a student like this. The most memorable was Katie. That kid would talk to furniture if no one else was in the room. She was the source of the most inane, continuous babbling I have ever encountered in my entire life. It really did not matter to her at all if anyone was listening to her or responding, nor if she was saying anything relevant to anyone. She’d just ad lib and talk nonsense for as long as you’d let her.

I am pretty patient with children and I liked Katie because she was basically a sweet kid who was like a wind-up chattering mouth when you got her started. However, on a couple of occasions (I saw her a couple times a day, including first thing in the morning, before sufficient caffeination occurred) I said, “Katie, you really have to STOP TALKING. NOW. You are driving me insane.” Did I mention that she also liked to bounce up and down while talking? Grrr.

Well… along with her babbling abilities, she also had a teflon ego. She never got insulted or took my pleas, however kindly or harshly phrased, as an insult. Occasionally she’d stick out her lower lip as if she were wounded by someone telling her to shut up, but that’s it. I had some conversations with her about installing a filter between mouth and brain. It would work sometimes, esp. if I offered a reward or threatened punishment for breaking the silence. Carrot and stick, pretty effective, and I’m lucky I was in a position to deal with her that way, because if she were a co-worker and not a student, I think I’d probably lose my temper sooner or later.

I wonder what’s going to happen to that kid. She was a very cute, good-looking naturally blonde cheerleader-type girl, so a lot of guys will likely be listening to her monologues in the future and doing this :rolleyes: . Ha ha! Hope it’s worth it, chumps!

But seriously, if anyone knows of a way to communicate to these people the value of silence, please pass it on. It’s a life skill I’d love to be able to teach.