I’m incapable of waffling. I say what I
mean and then I shut up. This was an enormous problem when I was in university
and I was faced with having to fill 20 blank pages with my opinion on, say, Jane
Austen’s preference for the colour blue (or something). After the first
paragraph or two, I’d made my point and could write my paper’s conclusion.
It’s not such a problem now. I say what I
have to say, no more, no less. I’m frequently silent when I’m in company, but
if the mood strikes, I can get chatty with the best of them.
There are a lot of
people who aren’t like this. Ask them a question and, somewhere in the middle
of their answer, you lose the will to live. Ok, maybe not that bad, but you
know what I mean: their answer is so long and circuitous that you get bored
halfway and regret having asked in the first place.
I met someone like this recently at a
conference. She was very passionate about her subject, and to start with, I was
interested in what she had to say. But after the second hour (or so it felt) of
listening to her saying the same thing in a hundred different ways, I started having
a conversation with myself in my head:
“Oh
look, there she goes again. And surprise, surprise, she’s making exactly the
same point!”
“Yep,
here comes that point again. And nope, she hasn’t added anything new to it this
time around either.”
“I
wonder whether there’ll be any dessert by the time she lets me go. I’d hate to
miss out on that cheesecake”
“The
waiters are cleaning up around us. I wonder whether they can sense my
desperation and have decided to make a rescue attempt.”
“If I
stop making eye contact, will she stop talking?”
“Maybe
if I feign death, she’ll go away.”
Have you met people like this? Do you feel my pain??
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