Have you ever met or encounter people who ask a lot of questions about you, just so that they can tell you about themselves?
How highly annoying is that?!
I know of one such person and it annoys the crap out of me. They ask you question, and just when you are about to get to the 4thword of your sentence, they interrupt you and tell you about their story instead and how they dealt with it, and how good/miserable they were and to ‘trust them” because they KNOW!
Not only that, they also tend to have a knack for always interrupting another person’s one-on-one conversation with someone else. Without shame, they just plonked themselves right in between the two people who are talking, and then move in to then dominate the whole conversation. A conversation that somehow morphed to one that is about their life!
It happens all the time, and by now, every time either one of the above happens, I just retreat. I basically just stop myself short, shut the fuck up, pretend to listen and then phase out by pretending to get busy with other things to leave the conversation.
I then subtlety roll my eye-balls.
These people, for some reason, are always super friendly. They always want to know what you are doing, always offering (unsolicited) advice, and projecting an image that they are offering genuine help. But, don’t get fooled, because all they are interested in is to tell you THEIR stories, and actually telling YOU how good they are.
They, actually, in all sense, hold zero interest in you, and the only interest they have, is, to make sure that you do not have an up-one-manship over them.
Too many people have been desensitized to the egotistical way of carrying on a conversation. Interrupting people , in my mind, is truly an insipid, self-centered and inconsiderate habit that manifests itself into the majority of the corporate population. It basically is a manifesto of telling you that they don’t find you interesting or worthy enough, and so they are just going to ramble on because they seem to feel that they are the superior being.
They seem to forget that there need to be TWO people to hold on a conversation, and when they start interrupting, what they essentially did is disregard the most basic rule of human interaction – namely of respect.
It is hard to be a good listener, and most people, especially bosses it seems, don’t listen enough. (I am, of course, generalising here)
But you know what, I am thankful for the existence of such annoyingly egotistical people in my life.
They have shown me exactly what not to be.
