Have you ever known anyone who, regardless of the circumstances, just has to engage in meaningless chatter whenever you encounter them? Even if you like them otherwise, they can be extremely annoying. They have to spend long minutes talking about he weather, or just something like, ‘hi, how’re you doin’ this mornin’, what’s up?’ There are no simple, short answers to this type of enquiry. Well, there are short answers. ‘I’m fine,’ and ‘nothing,’ come to mind. But the chatty person is never satisfied with them.
In a physical encounter, you have to learn to be creative in order to extricate yourself from this kind of conversation trap, and even if you’re good at it, you will on occasion upset the person who wants to ‘chat.’
Online, though, it really gets annoying, time wasting, and frustrating. I’m talking about the kind of person who, on social media, just sends a message like, ‘Hi, how are you? What are you doing?” As irritating as this can be in person, on line, where it requires you to drop everything and respond, it is infuriating. The problem with such people, too, is that they are tone deaf and semi-narcissistic. Telling them that you don’t have time to chat seldom works. When they send a ‘Hi, what’s up?’ and you reply with ‘I’m working. No time to chat now’, they come back with “What’re you doing?’ If you allow it, this can go on for an hour. They will respond to each message you send, and expect you to reciprocate. If you just stop, they will sometimes send multiple queries or nasty messages, castigating you for your non-responsiveness.
I recently accepted a ‘friend’ request on LinkedIn from such a person. As soon as I accepted it, she sent a message saying she’d like to chat every day. I responded that I couldn’t do that because I was too busy and was not the ‘chat online’ type, especially on a platform like LinkedIn which I use strictly for business. She seemingly ignored my message and began sending two or three messages a day asking to ‘just chat.’ I ignored them and finally got the following: ‘A person who has the decency not to reply to someone after reading a message, which you usually do, I think you are very rude.’ The message I didn’t reply to was, ‘I hope you have a productive day today!’. My response to the ‘I think you are very rude’ was ‘My apologies if you think I’m rude, but I told you in an earlier message that I’m not the chatty type. I seldom check this account accept to post and with my schedule really do not have the time to respond to every chat.’
If this person is typical of such personality types, she’ll do one of two things. She’ll come back at me with a really harsh condemnation of my rude behavior—I thought I was being fairly polite—or she will ignore me. I’ve had many across the various social media platforms and that’s the way it has usually worked out. They want to use the platform for meaningless, mindless chatter and they get upset at anyone who refuses to play the game. There are others, though, who just keep sending the ‘hi,’ ‘good morning,’ or ‘how’s it going’ messages and don’t seem to really care whether or not I respond. I wonder sometimes why they don’t just ‘unfriend’ me and go find someone else of like mind, but that would require engaging in a chat with them and I’d rather go for a root canal.
As for the one who is upset with me because she think’s I’m rude, my sincere apologies, but I really do not have the time to answer every ‘how are you doing’ message or email. I get up every morning at 5:00 am and if I’m not going out to a business meeting or speaking engagement, or doing one on Zoom or one of the other video platforms or by phone, I’m writing. In addition to this column, I have commitments to a publisher, am working on a co-write of a novel with another writer, supervise a research program for a think tank, and am preparing to teach a graduate history course on line with 20 sets of student papers to grade on a weekly basis.
If that doesn’t convince you that I’m too busy to chat, I give up. I guess I’ll just have to deal with you thinking I’m rude. – NWI
