Dear Abbie,
Please give me your opinion about something that seems to happen to me often and just happened again yesterday. You are in a group of people standing around in small groups talking — sometimes as small a group as two people — when someone walks up and begins talking to one of you, totally ignoring the person who was talking and totally oblivious of the fact that he is interrupting.
It’s as if the interrupter is saying, “I have something very important to say and it’s far more important than whatever it is that either of you were saying.” This is so irritating to me that I really want to say, “Hey wait a minute you jerk. We were talking here. Did you not see that? What in hell makes you think that what you have to say is so important that you have the right to break in?”
But I never do because I think I still have some vestiges of etiquette and respect left in me.
Sometimes the inverse of this happens to me with equal irritation. Two people are talking and you walk up to them wanting to say something to one or the other. But one of them continues to prattle on endlessly ignoring your presence as you patiently stand there waiting for them to take a breath. When after being ignored for 10 or 15 minutes, you start to walk away the person may (note: may) pause long enough to ask if you wanted to say something. When that happens — rarely — I usually say, “Oh, never mind. What you have to say is far more important than what I could ever add. I’ll catch you later after they put out the fire in your car.”
Irritated in Goleta
Dear Irritated,
I know exactly what you mean because is happens to me and, sadly, it seems to happen a lot wherever you go. And you are correct in saying that people who do this are ignoring your rights. The old concept of respecting the rights of others seems to have eroded greatly since I was a kid. (Remember the report card criterion — Respects the Rights of Others?)
I don’t think there is a polite way to respond to interrupters like this and even an impolite way would probably be to simply go over their head. My response when this happens is to interrupt the interrupter and say to person I was talking to, “We can talk more about this later.” And then walk away.
Another contemporary breach of etiquette is the person who invariably arrives late to an appointment of almost any kind. Their attitude seems to be saying, “My time is much more valuable than yours. It’s OK if you always have to wait for me.”
I love your remark to the person who refuses to allow you a word in edgewise.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business but he is a small business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE.