American Idol.
Personal health problems, medical treatment &c.
I’ll second gas prices. “Yup, prices sure are going up. I can’t figure out why a finite resource largely produced in the most volatile part of the world and in demand by everyone on the planet seems to increase in price. Boy sure is expensive, used to cost less.”
My personal list: children, the weather, any television show.
There is nothing so mundane that I can’t get involved into a serious argument over.
I like the act of conversing. The topic is secondary.
I do find that sports is a great way to fill that jones because you can just spout and spout and spout and it doesn’t make any difference, and there will be a new topic for spouting on the next day.
Politics is the opposite. The topics are too permanent, and it always winds up at a judgmental/personal place.
Sports are it for me, mostly because my level of interest in sports is so low that I have no chance of even following the conversation, let alone contributing. I don’t hold that against folks who want to talk sport, but I won’t be sticking around to take part.
But for anyone who wants to tell me how awful and unhealthy cheesecake is, I must insist that the only correct response is “More for me!”
Dang. Now I want cheesecake.
Someday, when someone is using some lame sports analogy, I hope to muster the gall to say something like: “That’s right! We’ve got to make a full-court press to get to the one-yard line, then we can chip on to the green to serve that ace, making a grand slam, and win the Stanley Cup!”
Right there with you - and in my office, there’s apparently something in the water, because they’re all spawning like rabbits, so that’s all anyone can talk about. I’m hard-pressed to even pretend to be interested anymore.
Go ahead, but be advised that you would be repeating a very old and very tired joke.
I’m on the opposite end of what Auntbeast said: my officemate’s eyes glaze over whenever I start talking poker with someone. 
There is no “boring yet popular” topic around here that bores me, but I know that others get annoyed with the poker talk among a certain group of us.
Wow! Am I the only one?
Sports, while pretty high, is only second on my list of “most boring subjects”.
Please, please, please shut up about your damn CAR FETISH!!
I don’t care what kind of transmission you dropped into your '76 308 big block Nova. Why can you figure out the gear ratio of twenty-five year old rear axles, but can’t understand why tax cuts for rich people are not helping? Yeah, I get that that old Mustang you restored is pretty cool, but your kids need new shoes. (Okay, that may be a little overblown.)
I’ll admit that maybe having a grandfather who was a car dealer and machinist, a father who sold cars most of my life, a brother who manages the service department of a car dealership and a job for 28 years building cars might have something to do with my lack of interest. (For the record, it’s not my family I’m complaining about. We find plenty of interesting things to talk about.)
I mean, how can anyone be interested in a tool for getting from one place to another when The Flower Kings just released a new CD?
I do have a hobby (quilting, needlework), it’s just that the mindless TV fare keeps me company during my long hours of stitching.
Purchasing People and Us I have no excuse for!! 
Weather is pretty much a driver of our moods–long gray winter giving way to byootiful spring is a huge deal.
Fantasy sports. (My high school friends. They’re fun most of the time, but they’ve had a baseball / hockey / football pool going on for the past fifteen years.) I couldn’t care less about actual sports, but I would a million times rather hear about actual games than about how much one guy is going to offer another guy for a pitcher and a first baseman.
Fake tans. (The admin staff of an office I worked in as an admin staff. I have never come closer to gouging my own eyes out with a stapler.)
I’m not allowed to talk about diet because I’m not overweight, I eat well and I exercise a lot. Thus I have no credibility among people who want to moan about how they can’t lose weight.
I don’t want to hear about kids. I have kids. I don’t put others through the torture of hearing about everything they do or how tall they are or how old they are, and I don’t want to hear it from anyone else. Besides, my kids are cuter anyway
Sports in general, but American football in particular. My husband is a huge fan. His brother is a huge fan. Their father is a huge fan. They are the kind of fans who become so emotionally involved in each game they have to be put on suicide watch in the event that their team loses or makes a bad play. I don’t understand it, but I have to hear about it. Every. Last. Stinking. Boring. Detail.
On a related note, the sports section of the local news broadcast is painfully boring to me. First of all, I couldn’t care less about the subject matter. Second, who knew it was possible to consolidate reports of local high school, state-wide college, and national pro sporting events into a thirty-second spot all while showcasing the writer’s skill with a thesaurus? This team didn’t beat the other team…they slaughtered them! The athlete didn’t run down the field…he rocketed to the endzone.
The weather. I hate being asked, “What d’you think about this weather, huh?” And if it rains 1/10,000th of an inch, people will frickin’ talk about it for weeks.
Television shows. I don’t watch Lost or 24 or American Idol or Survivor or The Amazing Race. I watch the History Channel or Discovery or re-runs of ER on TNT in the mornings. I am not wrapped up in any of them.
Another vote for sport and anything to do with it.
I don’t work in an office any more, but when I did there was always at least one person who could bore holes in granite with his interminable focus on sport, usually football. You wanna watch it / play it? Go right ahead. It’s of interest to you? That’s fine. Do we want to hear about it? No. Are we astonished and dismayed that in this rich, varied and fascinating world, the only thing that ever passes through your brain seems to be the activity of some guys who get paid to kick a ball around? Yes.
Man, you guys remind me why my office is so great. I have four other guys in my group. Only one one has children and he only talks about them when asked (and one of them is about 2 months old, prime blah blah blah age). None of them bring up sports, television, or their diet. The only health concerns I ever hear about are when tragedy has befallen someone’s parents (three of them are older and have had at least one parent die recently) and that is only when you inquire on how they are doing.
Conversation is limited to work and short jokes/stories. Occasionally there will be a political discussion or two.
I guess it does swing a little to far in that direction though. A couple months ago one of the guys mentioned he would be out next week. “Why?” I asked. “Getting married,” he replied. He had never even mentioned dating anyone (I had kind of assumed he was gay). I have to say I prefer that to what the rest of you are describing though.
Worse: what happened at their latest roleplaying session. Now, this could be quite interesting if it’s something funny, or if the gamesmaster came up with something really original and interesting, or even a half-decent “bad beat” story. But when it’s something that took no imagination, just the gamesmaster saying “it is so”, where the fuck is the appeal? I remember this kid going on and on about the treasure chest they found, with gems the size of goose eggs. Who cares? That kind of thing would be impressive in real life, not in a game where it comes down to one of the participants saying “you find a treasure chest with gems the size of goose eggs”.
Admittedly, this hasn’t happened as often since I turned 16.
What are fantasy sports?
Second after gas prices, I think traffic is another incredibly dull topic of conversation. As an urban doper, I notice it is the suburbanites who are obsessed with traffic. Traffic in DC sucks, live closer to work, or take metro, but shaddup already.
That’s my office, too! My immediate neighbor is a delightful person with whom I exchange jokes or tidbits a few times a day. But the office tends to maintain a near cathedral-like silence. I just started here at the end of January, and boy! the best choice I’ve ever made (and I’m fifty) !!!
Really? Bummer. Except for the run of Stanley-Cup jokes in the ancient Peanuts comics that never see the light of day any more, I’ve never heard such a thing.
Teaching. My girlfriend is a trainee teacher, and a friend of ours is a fully-fledged teacher, and of course they both have loads of teaching friends. My girlfriend (thankfully) doesn’t do this too much, but the rest of them just talk about teaching almost all the time.
Now, I work in IT. It is a dull subject. I try not to bore people with it. However, a friend of mine also works in the IT department of the same company, and we sometimes talk about work outside of it. But we talk to each other, and we realise that it is boring for everyone else because they don’t know the people we’re talking about. This is true for anyone’s work related conversation, as other posters have noted.
My theory about teachers is that because there is so much commonality between two teacher’s jobs, even at different schools, they can talk to each other about it in as much depth as two otherwise-employed people from the same workplace. AND, because they realise this is the case, and of course all of us went to school at one point in our lives, they believe that we are all equally interested and it’s relevant to all of us.
So it’s not so much the fact that the details of your class are boring (although they are), it’s that you expect me to be as interested, and to show the same empathy, as another teacher. I won’t.
Sorry, that sounds quite harsh - I didn’t mean it to. I respect teachers and I don’t want to do their job. Similarly, they don’t want to do my job and therefore I won’t talk to them about it as though they did.
Other than that… reality TV. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.