You have been talking to me for a long time. About taking pictures, this morning. Other mornings it’s been other topics. Other topics I don’t care about. I don’t take pictures. It’s not a subject of interest to me. Nor are the figurines you collect. Or the requirements of customers you used to have at other jobs. Or the personality quirks of people I will never meet. Why would you think I would care that?
Take a clue. When my eyes glaze over and I stop responding in words, I’m bored.
I don’t want to rude and flat out tell you that I don’t want to hear your meandering tales, but you’re forcing the issue. I cannot take it anymore!Shut the fuck up!!!
Sounds like a failure to communicate to me. But not a particularly unusual kind, at that. Females like to talk about everything in their lives and males aren’t necessarily interested. No big discovery there.
Interesting assumption there. I didn’t see a gender indicator anywhere in the above post. While I’m not staking a claim that the subject of the OP is not female, there’s nothing to specify that at all.
And I have a feeling that I’m probably only the first and, likely, the gentlest that’s going to point this out. Prepare…
I have an annoying co-worker like the person in the OP. We’re both female. I’ve had male co-workers who were just as bad. some people like to babble and some others don’t have the patience to listen to it. Gender has nothing to do with it.
There are a couple of people at the edges of my acquaintance at the bar who do this. One will talk for, literally, hours about his ex-boyfriend. Brady this and Brady that and Brady did this with this person and Brady had a fight with his new boyfriend, ad nauseam. You’re no longer seeing each other! Shut up about him, get a clue, and move on!
Another will go on and on and on about when he lived in California, talking about people that, hey, I don’t know, I never will know, and I couldn’t possibly care less about!
But I’m a polite, get-along-go-along, deathly afraid of giving offense type of person, so I listen. And yawn. And want to stuff about 40 napkins in their mouths.
I have a sister who tells interesting stories, but she really gets bogged down in the details, like the names of the people, the names of places, etc. I don’t know these people, and I don’t care about them. Just tell the danged story, already. Or, like spooje, you will see my eyes glaze over as you debate to yourself whether it was Janice in purchasing or Fred in AP who did this particular thing.
We recently spent about $1000 fencing in another part of our yard for the dogs, and he wanted to return some of the boards that were split, warped, too yucky to use…etc. So I go to the home improvment store with him, and instead of simply walking up to the counter and saying “I have some boards that are sub-par, I’d like to return them”, he starts in with “I was here last week and I looked through your whole selection of boards, and…blah,blah,blah…fence…blah, blah…dogs…blah”
Enough with the story already!! Just tell the helpful clerk you want to return the damn boards! She doesn’t care how many you looked through, or what shape the boards you turned down were, or how your fence is coming…arghhh! I swear, he can talk to anyone for hours, not when I’m along with you sweetie. In and out of the store, leave the clerk to do her job.
You know, this thread reminds me of a funny story. There was this guy who was a co-worker of mine–not at the job I’m in now, it was the job before that. Or maybe it was the job before last. You know, the job I had before the job I had before the one I’m in now. No, wait, it was definitely the job I had before I got my current position. Anyway, this guy, his name was Rick–or was that Rich? It was some sort of diminutive of “Richard”, but it wasn’t Dick–I don’t know why anybody who’s named Richard would voluntarily go by Dick, do you? “Ricky”, that was it–although I think he may have spelled it with an “ie” on the end, “Rickie”, which always looked weird to me. Of course now, looking at “Ricky” and “Rickie”, both of them are doing that thing where they don’t look like words anymore–isn’t it funny how words will do that sometimes when you think about them too much? Is there some sort of word for that? (And if you thought about that word too much, assuming there is a word for that, would it stop looking like a word, too? Ha ha! I guess the word for that would be whatever that word is, with the prefix “meta-” in front of it.) And it was the job before last; I mean, not the job I had before the job I have now, but the one before that. Anyway…
You are exactly right. The person is a co-worker. And a man. I actually typed the OP while he was droning on and on and on…till I wanted to fake my own death to get away.
We’ve all got stories to tell. Not all of them will be interesting to everyone. Some will only be intersting to a select few(those with similar experience). This guy, who is a smart and nice man, does not make this distinction at all.
I swear to God, I wanted to scream last night. Many other nights too.
I feel your pain. My grandfather is in the same long-winded, mind-numbingly boat. No one ever wants to be rude and tell him to be quiet, so during car trips and family dinners, we’re treated to a monologue of yard trimmings, book plots, uneventful family vacations from 30 years ago and Army stories we’ve all heard a dozen times before.
I can’t decide which factor makes it worse-unnecessary detail or the subject matter itself. My dad claims that my grandfather never used to say anything at all, so I guess he’s making up for lost time.
Is your grandfather hard of hearing? I have this theory that some people develop the monologue habit when they start to have trouble following conversations. It’s less embarassing to do all the talking than to have to keep asking people what was said.
I pity anyone who walks in the front door of my office, for the simple fact that they are virtually guaranteed to hear every detail of the life of our receptionist’s dog. Or her horse. Or the funny (usually not) thing her husband said the other day. Or some bizarre take on politics today that Rush Limbaugh talked about…
Around these parts, we call these people Time Vampires!
And they do, indeed, come in all forms and sexes - the day cook at my favorite restauraunt has yet to comprehend that I like to read my paper over lunch - he’ll stand there for 10 minutes straight, or until an order is up, telling me his latest tale…
How tall was he? Did he wear a suit? Was it single breasted or double? Belt or suspenders? Did it have a vest? Was he like Richard Hatch? The one on Survivor, not the one who was Apollo, or was it Starbuck, on Battlestar Gallactica, not the one who was on The A-Team later, the other one, although we really don’t know what kind of person Richard Hatch, the Galactica guy, was because he was just an actor. Hey, the Survivor guy was a corporate something or other, maybe it was the same guy, wouldn’t that be weird. He went by Rich, so it probably wasn’t the same guy, unless it was just the other people on the island who called him that and he went by Dicky when he was working with you. I hate him too.
