Monday, January 31, 2005

make it stop

I was looking at this book the other day that gave a script of what you tend to say when you run into someone you haven't seen in awhile, along with a translation of what you really mean. It was funny because "hi!" actually meant "shit!" It made me think about this woman at work who makes me feel like my face is caving in. She's one of those people who really isn't all that bad, plotting evil in the lunchroom or anything, but she'll just stop and talk to you about absolutely nothing for huge, gaping spaces of time throughout the day. I'm not even positive that she works there; she might just wander around, talking. If I've got three kids hanging off me, and one of them has just been bitten by a mountain lion and the other one is eating a rusty nail, she'd still stop me to have some inane conversation that is inevitably a recap of a conversation we had the day before to address an issue that was not an issue the first time around. I swear, I'm starting to hear, "Oh Red, one quick thing..." in my sleep. She's a well-intentioned black hole. WHY does every workplace have somebody like this? So anyway, I'm wondering if anyone has had any luck with finding a polite way to say, "Please stop talking to me about stupid crap." My "best wishes for continued success" only works on e-mail. Perhaps, "Would you be so kind as to refrain from engaging me in conversation that bears no relevance to anything?" Actually, that just makes me sound British. I need ideas...

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