People Who Interrupt
Glad to be back home and among people who will almost unfailingly let me finish a sentence. Being away at that Regional Youth Event most of last week reminded me all over again how there are some individuals in this world who simply will not let you finish your sentence in progress. They interrupt, they cut you off, they ride right over what you're saying, like a prerecorded videotape when the "play" button is hit off cue.
I've always found people who interrupt to be extremely annoying. To say nothing of rude. The worst is folks who ask you a question, and then before you can get more than half a dozen words out, they interrupt you. Sometimes on a completely different tangent, sometimes (and this the the very worst of the worst) finishing your answer for you in their own words, which seldom amount to anything you would've said, left to your own uninterrupted devices. I'm like, if they didn't want to leave me to answer their question in 25 words or less, then why the hell did they ask me in the first place?
Really. There must be a special circle in hell for chronic and habitual interrupters. If I didn't fear God and the law, I would be strongly tempted to deal with such folk by pulling out a sawed-off baseball bat and beating them into roadkill with it. People who interrupt! Talk about annoying. To say nothing of rude...
posted by paul @ 7:08 AM
1 Comments:
I knew some people with whom, for certain reasons, I had periodic arguments. They'd always interrupt me! Finally I started using conscious passive aggression -- turning on my heel and walking away whenever they interrupted me. Well, they couldn't afford for the discussion to be cut off, and so the interruptions stopped. The arguments grew shorter, and became punctuated with silences. This was because all of us were getting to make our points. Disputes got settled, and generally everything went a lot more easily after that.
My father used to laugh about people who complained of his interrupting him, because he figured that they were annoyed that he correctly anticipated what they wanted to say, which in fact he was quite good at. Now I do it to him, because otherwise he'd maunder on, you know....
People so often interrupt me that it annoys me quite a bit. The problem is that I've a habit in starting with a qualification and winding up with the main point, which is often counterbalanced against the qualification. So people often think that I'm saying something quite different than what I intend to say. And I seem unable to turn my talk around, get my main point out first. It's such a habit.
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