Maybe that's why? She is aware of it, and tell everyone, when you're tired just tell me and I'll leave, cuz I know I can talk all night. She is one of the nicest people I have met in a long, long time. So I overlook it, she explains it that she very much likes being 'sociable'

have an SIL like that. Just drones and drones and drones.
Fortunately we can pick our visits and usually escape fairly well.
I would hate to be a captive audience.

Also, wanted to add that I am by nature a quiet, contemplative person, so this person's behavior was harder on me than if she were talking to an extrovert, I think.

But thankfully nothing like the way that you were trapped. That's freaking awful.

There are ways that we unintentionally make it worse for ourselves, such as by giving semi-verbal encouragement like "Mm-hmm" or "Oh" or "I see." Compulsive talkers see this as a heartfelt plea for them to continue..

Even non-verbal cues such as nodding or smiling can be enough to keep them going.

It's maddening, and on some level (conscious or otherwise) they're relying on your default human politeness to keep you from telling them to shut the hell up, even if your ears are bleeding.

I work with someone who, as we say in the office, "doesn't know when the conversation is over." That is, she'll continue long after exhausting all relevant information about this morning's coffee, or the bathroom soap dispenser, or the numer of parking spaces in the lot this morning.


In short, I feel your pain.

As part of my 3 day ordeal, I was subjected to a detailed psychoanalysis of her problematic childhood, motherhood, grandmotherhood, marriage, work history etc., so I do believe she had many issues. Perhaps talking is a way to keep the mind demons at bay. But who knows??

Although I'm inclined to be sympathetic if they actually have some kind of underlying issue, it's really not my place (or responsibility) to help them work it out, least of all when I'm trapped in whatever situation with them.

There's no good way to get out of it, either. If your request is subtle, then they simply ignore it. If you're unsubtle, then you're the jerk because they're "just making conversation."

Unfortunately, I revealed that I am a retired psychologist. And you can imagine the rest of that scenario...

at escaping from these types?

You do specialize in human behavior. So, is it easier for you to avoid becoming the victims of someone like this? Are you able to use your skills in everyday life in ways that insulate you from narcissistic types like this?

Or do you struggle along with the rest of us?

...I am on an airplane, I NEVER tell anybody what I do.

I am guessing you will keep your past career to yourself next time, if the private room thing doesn't work out. I had a hip replacement almost 3 years ago, and had to ask for a room change because the woman in the next bed cried, moaned, shrieked and called for Jesus with every breath when her pain meds weren't working. While I empathized, I couldn't take it. I got moved across the hall, and could still hear her. The new roommate showed every promise of being a talkaholic, but, most fortunately, was discharged a couple hours later and I had the room to myself for the rest of my stay.

If you are in any sort of health care/helping profession, total strangers think you are interested in hearing all sorts of personal stuff about them. One of my standing rules is, "I will talk about poop at the office, where I am paid to do so, but that's it."

There are millions of them!

But I assume most of them grow out of the habit.

We were in a "pod," individual units separated by thin walls. This woman either had constant visitors or was on the phone. And they would have LOUD prayer sessions! I didn't get any sleep unless I was drugged.

I tend to think it may be an unidentified form of OCD, but, probably does not interfere with their lives enough to warrant a psychological classification. What they do to others is another matter!

When I was a teenager, my girlfriend's mother was a compulsive talker. You'd find her alone in a room talking away any time of the day or night. It did not matter if there was any one there or not. It was very strange, that is all I remember about it.

As for the rest of the family, I believe this woman was divorced and the daughter didn't think it to be a problem as it was just "the way she is" to her.

So now we know that it is a disorder called logorrhea is! Thanks for this info.

will talk while he does anything, even reading. I'm pretty sure he'll grow out of it...I hope.

Specifically, on certain subjects.

When I was in the rehab hospital after each knee replacement my roommates were great. The first one liked to watch a Christian TV channel and would leave it one when she was out of the room. I'd brought headphones with me to plug into the TV over my bed and once she realized that I didn't want to listen to her choice of programs she turned it off when she left the room. I explained to her and to the other roommate that since I liked to sleep with the TV on, I'd brought the headset so I wouldn't disturb my roommate.

If the facility where you will be has TVs that you can plug a headset into, that works great. Even you get another talkaholic, the headset will give you some peace, especially if you have noise cancelling ones. Even if you just turn the sound completely off, you can pretend you are watching a program and tune her out.

I hope your hip replacement is healing well and good luck with the other one!

My first replacement is doing great! It was the worst one so am hoping the next will be a piece of cake, especially after a couple of months of PT.

Glad to hear you are doing good.

who had the TV on all the time.

With any luck at all, I'd be sentenced to solitary confinement somewhere.

And the curtains between the beds were dense enough to block most of the light. So with my headphones on, I was reasonably insulated from whatever the roommate had on and they didn't have to listen to what I had one.

The first roommate liked having her TV on all night and the second didn't mind so long as she didn't have to listen to it so it worked out for all of us.

Besides, in a Medicare funded rehab hospital there are noises all day and all night. Having the TV on was better than listening to all that. The only thing it didn't insulate me from were the alarms for the elderly who got out of bed when they weren't supposed to. One lady fell three times in one night even after they'd put an alarm that went off every time she got out of bed without help. The third time she broke her hip - again. She was there to help her recover from breaking it previously. Poor lady did not remember that she was supposed to get a nurse before getting up since she needed help to stand. That night we got the alarm three times, the lady screaming, then the noise as the EMT crew came to take the woman back to the hospital to get her hip fixed again.

Having the TV on saved my sanity and most nights helped me sleep.

Trying to get off the phone with them is the worst!

Best of luck with your recovery!

People do that for many reasons, not all controllable, but you certainly have a right to let staff know anything that makes your recovery harder. And you should.

Should have pushed for a private room, but didn't really know how. Whenever the subject came up they said no private rooms are available. Hoping if we offer to pay a higher co-pay I can get one, next time.

On my way from recovery to my hospital room, the orderlies were laughing and telling me what a "character" my roommate was. I stated something like, oh great, I get a character when all I want is to sleep. It went downhill from there.

They are outside talking nonstop 6 to 12 hours a day. And they talk VERY loud, yelling often. Even when he is alone he loudly sings or will call someone to talk to on speakerphone. We have to listen to it through our closed windows. We rarely open the windows. I think they have started to get the hint that they should take their nonstop talking inside after yelling at them to shut the hell up and loudly mocking them several times.

She'll put both her hands on my hips or play with my clothes and just start talking in my face about who knows what. My other coworkers usually laugh at me while it's happening, and then offer me pity later. She also gives my other coworkers nicknames, such as "sweet tits," which pisses some them off. She hasn't called me anything so explicit. I usually get "doll" or "sweetheart" or something else tame. She doesn't piss me off, but she's one of the few people that makes me feel awkward.

so I suspect it's a carry over from that experience.

and calling someone SWEET TITS in the workplace is ridiculous

interest than what the yapper had to say. The curtain can be opened but also closed and alone time and private visits are allowed.
So I would care less that this person think me a snob or loner, I would get my peace.
Sure it would nt be the first time society let her politely know buzz off!

... I have to plan my encounters with her in small doses, like once every few months, and then while she literally runs on and all over the map for +2 hours on the phone - without me getting a word in edgewise - I have a running dialog with myself to remind me that it's almost over, I don't have to deal with her for another 3 - 4 months etc.

It's really quite painful and makes me sad because she could be an awesome pal to do things with but she just does. not. shut. up.
And she doesn't understand (or care) how it affects me & others.

She was a highly intelligent and well educated person, but the lack of verbal filters destroyed her ability to have happy relationships, imo. I thought it was telling that the only relative who came to visit her was her husband, despite the fact that she had 3 children and 5 grandchildren, all of whom lived close by.

and the thing is, they both drive a Fla to California trip that is a team operation, so I have had to cover for their co-drivers a few times (I'm on the "Extra" board, so I do a lot of fill-in work).

Of course it's made worse by the fact that I am stuck in a tractor with them and there is no escape! The only way to get them to shut up is to close the sleeper curtain and tell them I'm hitting the rack.

One of them. just like you mention, starts up the second I get out of the bunk and talks about absolutely NOTHING of any consequence. Add to that he begins talking complete non-sequiters and is a right wing bigot!

The other one, while he means well and has a good heart, told me very matter-of-factly that "They found Noah's Ark, you know." !!

Needless to say, I am usually so damned ready to get out of the truck after a cross country ride with them, I leave skid marks!

As luck would have it, I'm scheduled to run with the bigot this Friday! The only reason I even agree to take these trips is because they pay pretty good - basically a week and a half worth of pay in 5 days.

One good thing, thank Dog, was that my blabber mouth hospital room mate was on EXACTLY the same political page as me. I might have had a complete meltdown otherwise.

Or invest in noise cancelling headphones, or whatever they're called.

I'm also stone deaf in my left ear, so I can just claim I can't hear him.

But it is unavoidable, frankly. At some point he is going to bug me to the point I will snap at him. It's happened before.

I asked for a different room mate when I was in the hospital, in part because of the non-stop talk. I also was not at all impressed with the constant rotation of visitors in and out of that room. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but it is a freaking HOSPITAL not a karaoke bar or Jerry Springer set. If it wasn't her yapping on and on about anything and everything it was a continual string of creepy-assed family members nattering on about every family drama in the last thirty years or the last nail appointment they'd had. (Seriously. It was unrelenting, and it was at maximum volume.) I hit break point with that whole freak show about the time one of them turned on a County Western song and decided to lip sync for all our viewing pleasure.

I dragged my IV cart out to the nurse's station and told them I was probably gonna either kill somebody or else go lay down in the visitor's lounge unless they either got me the hell away from that freak show or else kept that room clear and the woman muzzled. It was a near thing. The nurses commented that they were aware of the issue and that other patients had complained about that women. They moved her out a couple hours later and put her in a room down at the other end of the hallway.

I know I sound really harsh, but let's be honest here--a hospital is where SICK people go. Yah, I'll try and be patient with the various oddities of human behavior, but there comes a point where they do impact on your mental health and your ability to focus on getting better.

YMMV, but I am just not that easy going when I am in pain or sick.


Laura

I just kept figuring I "only" have two full days with this, so I can cope. Never again!

You can ask him a simple question, like "How are you doing?", and he can turn it into a 3 hour conversation that you might get 5 words in edgewise! He's a great guy, otherwise...

Peace,

Ghost

One is my lovely SIL. She came up to visit for a few days and after 2 days of non-stop gabbing, I couldn't wait for her to go home. The only time I had a minute's peace was when we went to a local museum. I went one way to look at the paintings and she went the other.

Another is my college roommate. The last time I went to visit her, I was subject to day's-long talking about people that I DO NOT KNOW. Why do people think that hearing about strangers is a fascinating subject?

Another one was an employee of mine who talked non-stop about anything that came into her mind. Did I want to know the colors of her nail polish? Not really, but I heard about them anyway. The bad part was that she talked instead of working, which eventually led to her being let go.

And I can't forget my old tennis partner. He'd say "Hi, how are y...." and before I could even say "fine", he'd be off and running with old WWII stories. It's a wonder any tennis was played.

Talking while doing virtually everything else in life has to be a unique art form!

that you are a stranger telling all us humble readers about strangers.

Talk about "talk"...

For some months out of the year my job is pretty stressful. Made even more so by the constant chatter of people who are across the cube wall from me. They never. shut. up. They bounce from one topic to another to another to another from the time they get in until they leave. Another thing I have to deal with is a coworker who takes personal calls while at his desk, making his business our business. And now he's expanded into doing -- out loud -- the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle with his deskmate. They spent the entire day on it yesterday, which is why I'm home today. The thought of going into another day of that shit was just too much. (We're in a lull with work right now, which explains why there's so much time on his hands.)

I really like the term "talkaholic." That precisely fits people who, for whatever reason, see silence as a vacuum and can't help but abhor it.

I really think that these people are missing a few essential brain cells. They try to fill the void with noise!

I do fall back on music and podcasts, but I can't have headphones on for 8-plus hours a day!

Some people are just so self-absorbed, it's sad. And I did I say that most of the conversation is mindless and has no real point?

Like my parents, she was a war refugee who managed to get out of a displaced persons camp in postwar Europe and emigrate to the U. S. I sort of recall that my mom (who died in 1975) telling me that the poor woman saw her own mother struck and killed by a car right in front of her, not long after arriving in NY. Deeply traumatizing, on top of the refugee and war experiences. Anyway the dear lady talked constantly in a stream-of-consciousness way about anything that popped into her head. She couldn't help it or stop it. It was awful to be around it, and her husband and daughter must have suffered a lot.

Thank god for email. My voicemail message says I do not check my voicemail.

Nothing like a five minute voicemail for pure agony.

I need to be in the mood for them.
But I would rather have them talk than not talk.
I am more of an extrovert, so I like when people talk to me.

I was admitted around midnight and it took the rest of the night for them to find me a bed. They took me up to the room around 5:00 a.m. I thought YAY! The YAY! turned to OH NO! when after I was placed into the bed I heard murmuring on the other side of the curtain, a 30ish woman staying with her elderly mother. Every night she did a shift from 7 pm to 7 am. In the morning adult men stayed with her. The men were OK but the daughter not so much. She had no regard for me. It was a slumber party every damn night and I needed a sedative so I could sleep. We had nasty arguments every night and when a bed became available in the next room, although the head nurse knew we had problems, he wouldn't move me.

One night it was quiet on their side late and I thought hey maybe I won't need that sleeping pill. Turned out the patient had become unresponsive- when they came to take the vitals they couldn't wake her up. All hell broke loose with the staff and the equipment and all the lights turned on. Then the family arrived around 2 a.m. Far from being able to sleep without a pill, I was up all night watching the drama. (She survived and was moved to the ICU.) After that my room mate was a crazy woman. I was extra happy to be released.

The main one I had to deal with in the past would come in and chat with me after the workday was over and I was ready to go home. I think he had marital problems and was stalling because he didn't feel like going home to his wife. But the issue for me was he would come into my office and block the door so I couldn't leave and he'd just talk at me. He was a freeper, so it was extra awesome - yes, I'd love to stay at work for free on my own time to hear your racist rants.

Current one - I accidentally stepped on him last week. He was talking and talking and talking and I was walking around an open area having short but important deadline- work related conversations with other people in the room. I turned around and stepped on him - I knew I had walked away while he was still talking nonsense at me, but I hadn't realized he was just following me like a puppy dog one step behind still talking.

I've talked about me for quite awhile now.

Let's change the subject.

What do you think about me?

that there were some people that when their eyes opened, their mouth opened and did not stop until they went to sleep.

Not sure I have actually met somebody quite like that, but a couple of co-workers are close. The one guy I said that trying to talk to him was like trying to talk to a train. Say what you want, his train just kept rolling - and he has no indoor voice.

I think he liked talking though, because that gave him an excuse to stop working.

Another co-worker would go on and on, and low quality stuff too. About her I wondered - if you put duck tape over her mouth, would her head explode? Not that I would, but sheesh, give it a rest now and then.

In "Adam Bede", George Elliot wrote "Some folks tongues are like the clocks that keep ticking, not to tell you the time, but because something is wrong with their insides."

She also wrote (although she put both these quips into the mouths of characters) "Some folks are like the rooster who thinks the sun came up just for the purpose of hearing them crow."

and then there's John Madden.

Even when I meet a new person, I learn their entire life history.

I think maybe it's because I have a kind face (or so I've been told), and I don't talk much myself.

I've gotten used to it. You can learn a lot, and I enjoy hearing stories.

But yeah, sometimes...

All he yabbers on about is sports and superhero movies.

talks all day. Talks on the phone, talks to people around him... and never comes up for air. I'm not one to listen to music but recently I brought in a music player with head phones so I could get a break from him for an hour or so a day.

love her to pieces
when she isn't here.

He talks to me about people as if I know who they are (I don't, they're his family I've never met). Tells me the same story over and over.
My husband isn't a non-stop talker, but he will often talk constantly while I'm trying to work (I'm a professor, I live in my own mind). It can get frustrating.

I am a very introverted person with strangers (and even with family and friends, depending on my mood). I do NOT like engaging strangers, or anyone else, unless on my own terms. My family can't stand it, as they're all very chatty.

Yes, he's well-published and fairly popular. He's affable up to a point, but has a habit of colluding with the boss to get people he doesn't care for fired. In meetings he talks non-stop, dominates, sucks up all the air. When students visit his office for consults, they say one word to his 400 plus. He also laughs a bit like a horse.

We gave him tenure this year. He's pretty good at what he does. But he's insufferable.

In the situation you described, I would be fine.

But with groups of people, whenever there is that awkward silence...I fill it. I can't stop myself. You know when the teacher asks the class a question, and everyone looks away or looks down at their desk? And the teacher says "I can wait all day" - I am the one who raised her hand - even in frickin law school when I was just asking for trouble then because I was usually unprepared.

I was that way in group therapy - fortunately there were a couple of other silence fillers so we would rotate.

My husband is quiet (he has no choice - ha) by nature, so it works out. I don't even really like talking that much (ok sometimes I do) I just hate uncomfortable silence.

Or perhaps what I consider uncomfortable silence others consider peaceful

I find them to be rude and inconsiderate. Extremely uncomfortable dealing with them as an introvert when they will not take the hint.

I know one who will just keep talking even if you don't even acknowledge them at all. No consideration for what you're doing or whether you're listening.