How to Spend an evening with a Boring Person without getting too Bored

Among other dafts one can encounter in the course of our day to day existence, one prominent type are those who love to talk about themselves. It is invariably in a self aggrandizing way that they love to discuss, analyze and interpret themselves ad nauseum, they only are on the lookout for a receptive audience like yours truly. I am the all time masochist.

Through an unexpected stroke of ill luck, I bumped into such an old acquaintance last week. This non-stop talkathon guy insisted that I have dinner with him, which essentially was two hours spent being subjected to an unending, oppressive barrage of informational updates from his extremely disinteresting life. (Of course I did not get any opportunity to fill him with details of what’s been happening with me, not that I intended to anyway.)

The man leads a team of sales guys who sell some highly sophisticated medical equipment thingamajigs to those high end specialty surgeons and other such doctors who have a long list of pomposity portraying abbreviations after their names. As a result of his two hour dinner talkathon, I have been privileged enough to get to know how those equipment work, who buys them, how he manages to patao doctors who don’t know a thing about equipments and how it is only because of brilliant guys like him that the docs can treat dying patients, and thus how his is a noble profession, going on to how he fucks his sales team’s happiness (said amidst loud guffaws, while gulping down swigs of the cheap whiskey he ordered), and how he has been a top performer blah blah, how he was sent by his company on a well deserved and rewarding, 7 day all expenses paid holiday trip to Dubai (yuck, a place and a half to holiday in!!) and how he is almost on the verge of buying a brand new Honda city, and generally how much of a corporate success he has been and how his stock in the marriage market has skyrocketed.

My modus operandi in such situations goes thus:-
1) Concentrate more on the booze, even cheap whiskey serves well-enough to numb your senses to a suitable extent to help one appreciate ball talk like that.
2) Periodically, pretend to be interested and impressed, this will help him talk more and order more of such cheap whiskey
3) While chatting with waiters around, refer to your companion as “sa’ab” as in “: “Sa’ab ke liye refill laao.” Works wonders, Sa’ab gets his much desired ego massage.
4) Act elated when he says, “I like to share drinks and thoughts with only a few select buddies”

And that’s just how you can spend an evening with a boring person without getting too bored.

Cheers!!