avoidance

I admit I’ve never been the best at social relations but throughout the years, I think I’ve come a long way from being painfully shy in front of everyone to being able to crack jokes with strangers on occasion.  As much as I’ve progressed, I realize I still have roadblocks, like when people converse with me on subjects I don’t give a crap about.

How do you squirm your way out of inane topics?  Do you pretend there’s an emergency on the other end of your "vibrating" phone call?

"This debt ceiling discussion is fascinating but my son got his penis stuck in the swimming pool filter.  Again.  The doctor said he could circumcise himself the next time this happens!"

Do you feign a bathroom emergency and politely excuse yourself from the topic at hand? 

"My apologies.  I’d love to hear about the grooming habits of your ferret but I’ve got to go to the john and pinch off a loaf."

Or, as I’ve been forced to do, do you stand there and take your punishment?

There’s two particular co-workers who constantly go on about boring subjects like their children or their home.

For example, in the span of one day, I had one lady go on about how her grandson couldn’t pronounce "grandmother" so he calls her "gandnunner."  In my opinion, she’s actually a grand nutter.  See, the thing is, I might be interested if I had kids or thought kids were cute but I simply can’t relate.  It was totally a grandparent story meant to be shared with other grandparents who can appreciate cute kids with speech impediments, not a twenty-something necrophile such as myself.

I walked up to another coworker and went through the usual greetings.  "Hey, how’re you?" I asked.

"I’m good," she said, her voice hesitent.

"Ya sure about that?"

"Well, I’m good today.  Yesterday was a bad day."

"Aw.  How come?"

"Well, you know we got that new guinea pig?"

I didn’t, but for the sake of continuing the conversation, I nodded.

"Well, it had a seizure last night.  And kind of died."

"Oh, no.  I’m sorry to hear… wait, what do you mean ‘kind of?’"

"Well, we had to…finish."

"ALL RIGHT, I’ve gotta go back to my department now!"

Being an animal lover, it always seems people want to tell me about their horrific encounters with furry creatures, like how their pet goats were violently ripped apart by a pack of wild coyotes or how their fluffy new kitten crawled into their dad’s engine and the mess it made when he started it up that morning or how they hit a deer with their car and it’s leg got caught in the carburetor and it was dragged three miles until the tendon finally snapped, leaving the poor thing wailing and writhing in the road.  And then they finish off with h a sensitive, "At least it didn’t ruin my paint job."

And this one lady, God bless, just over shares.  She’s told me stories of her gnarled toes and twisted spine and how all of her teeth are cracked or broken in some way.  The other day she guffawed as she told me the story of her trying to paint her house.  Real mouth-watering material, right?  Then, she went on to tell me about how her house was wired and asked me a question about circuit breakers.

"I don’t know anything about that stuff," I said, hoping she’d drop the subject but instead, it backfired on me and she took extra time to explain how it all works.  I stood there for fifteen excruciating minutes, my soul bleeding, as she went into detail about how she labeled the wires, painted over paneling, and something about electrical sockets.  For a second, I thought I had slipped into HGTV.

It gets worse when she stammers on her words, which prolongs her exhausting monologues.  It’s as if she’s so excited to tell me about her bunions and scoliosis that she can’t get the words out fast enough.

As I’ve said before, my job isn’t physically hard.  But the mental exertion of pretending to be engaged in conversation wears me down.  To protect my sanity, I usually tune them out and employ the usual head nods and verbal cues to continue their stories.  All the while, I’m wondering when they will stop, or if they ever will.  Is this my hell?  Replacing the inferno with insufferable stories of potted plants and parenthood?  I just don’t have the energy.

It’s sad to admit I often evade these types of people.  If I see them coming (or in some cases, hear them, because their incessant laughing is so booming), I hide behind fixtures or walk in the opposite direction.  I’ve even ducked into a fitting room like I’m dodging a grenade and waited there, holding my breath until I hear them pass.

Now imagine having to do this dance daily.  And imagine getting caught like a fly in a spiderweb of stupid stories, tightly bound by social niceties, squirming on the inside but knowing it’s futile.  You wriggle until the exhaustion sets in, stand there and give up, laugh out loud and let the poison infect and numb your skull.