I just did some volunteer training for the NDP today, and they brought up an interesting problem that I’ve run into way too many times... people people who will just talk your ear off forever and ever. They warned about the vampires, who suck away all your time.
Brevity is wit.
I tend to be pretty impatient when it comes to long drawn out speech. I find that at every event with a Q&A there will be a few people who just monopolize the microphone, giving a statement rather than asking a question. I think I wrote about that just a couple days ago.
It’s easy to shut these people down when you disagree with them… but sometimes you agree. Those are the fuzzy vampires, who you get along with but who still suck away all your time.
Of course you can find it in other settings as well. I’ve had a lot of patients where, when I ask them a simple and direct question, they’ll give me a ten minute essay that doesn’t actually lead anywhere.
What the instructors today had to say was that for some of these people, it’s the first time anyone’s ever asked them their opinion… for one, it had been the first time anyone had ever knocked on his door. Funny, I thought that’s what the internet was for, but I guess some people don’t have it.
The lesson, though, was that sometimes you just have to go away, no matter how much you agree with them, or how much you want to argue with them. Life’s too short.
And as for the open mic? You need to be willing to shut them down, because they aren’t just wasting your time, they’re wasting a hundred people’s time. At the event earlier this week I suggested using the Oscar music to play them off… but you can always just cut the power.
I used Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” picture for that post. But just because you have freedom of speech doesn’t take away other people’s freedom to not listen.
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