irrelevant details, fed up, is it just me?

[JoanFrenulum]

With DH mostly. I ask him to do a thing, I don't want a blow-by-blow account of exactly how he's doing the thing. I just asked him to sort out seats on a flight so that he, I and DD are all sat together. So he gave me this stream of consciousness through the entire process, down to telling me how he's deciding between calling customer service on the phone or on Skype. I DON'T FUCKING CARE. AIBU? I asked him to do it because I had loads of other things to take care of; if I'd wanted to know about all the details I would have done it myself.

I stayed nice but am boiling inside. Or, also today, over lunch with relatives he treated us all to a blow-by-blow account in real time of him figuring out when his next colonoscopy is, right down to looking up the time difference between time zones. NOBODY CARES WHEN YOU ARE GETTING YOUR ARSE INSPECTED. SPECIALLY NOT AT LUNCH ON HOLIDAY.

He's basically a pretty good bloke. How do I say "For the love of god spare me the liveblog" without sounding like a bitch?

OK maybe I am being a bit U but I need to vent somewhere or I'll say something mean IRL, and I really truly don't know how to ask him to tone down the granularity of the commentary without sounding mean.

DH does this sometimes. If it's been a while since he last did it I'll let him ramble on and then say "that was a really good story, will you tell it again?" And he laughs and gets my point. If he's been doing it a lot and I've lost patience I just stop him and say "you can carry on but you should know that I'm really not listening".
He never takes offence but gets the point! Just tell him OP

My mum is forever telling me long and not very interesting stories about people I don't know and always ends by telling me how funny it was and how much I would have laughed if I'd been there. I just smile politely.
She also calls everyone you their first and last name even her best friends who I've known my whole life so it's never a story about Margaret and Marjorie. It's always "You know Margaret Jones and Marjorie Smith" even though I would call these people Mags and Marj when I see them.

No kavawassyername I don't want to look at your side bloody pervert bloody spammer did you know that I saw a can of spam in Aldi the other day it was on offer it reminds me of monty python spam spam spam spam ham eggs chips beans and spam wonderful spam should we put this on the Brexit peepers list I think I should tell them the good thing about spam. Is that it never goes off unlike spam messages which eventually get deleted my legs ache so I said to the doctor my legs ache he said that's funny dear have you got a broken leg time is a grater healer cheese

Can I also put into the mix the irritating conversational aside that happens frequently with my MIL? Telling a long-winded story about people I don't really know, can't recall the name of one of tangential players, stops narrative to try to remember the name "Now was it Susan, gosh, I really can't remember, I'm sure her name begins with an S, but it probably isn't Susan. Is it Shirley? etc etc etc" until eventually I have to say - "it doesn't matter though, does it? I don't know them." and we can finally get back to the main narrative about the original people I don't really know...

My parents do this a lot with places - 'she lives in the house just past the garden centre - you know, just off the A453? Near where Linda lives?' - which is tedious enough, but then the other one will disagree - 'no, it's before the garden centre, near that roundabout with Wickes on it. Just past that place where we got the dog groomed'. The first one will then disagree and we'll then have a five minute debate on the matter. I never have a clue where they're talking about AND it's never relevant to the story. They also sometimes do it with years - 'it was 1992', 'no, it must have been 1994 because we had the Renault', 'no, that can't be right because we didn't yet have the conservatory'. I adore them both but it drives me mad!

YANBU!

I think this is actually two different problems:

First is that some people seem to be completely unaware that they're doing their internal monologue aloud if it's anything more challenging than choosing socks. Like they have to concentrate so hard on the thinking that they don't have enough brain power left to control their brain-mouth connection.

Second is that some people just seem unable to talk in short, simple sentences and waffle instead.

The crux of it is some people are good storytellers and some aren’t. I’m bad at many things but when I recount things I know the key points that are relevant to the audience rather than feel I have to convey my version of it regardless of who is listening.

My DH is terrible for wanting to give endless detail which he finds personally relevant instead of understanding what aspects of his communication are interesting to others. He gets especially preoccupied giving weights and measurements of things.

He would tell you I am too sensationalist in communication, because I give the headlines. I don’t personally think people want all the details up front and if they do they’ll ask for them.

dh and I use this ....

Aww my lovely Dad does this. At the start of a monologue I just want to blurt out that I’ve already guessed the ending!

Ohhh gawd you lot are great. Thank you. No time to reply individually today but some lovely perspectives and scripts and I've never heard of Kevin Turvey , and cheers to the comedians!

Ugh YANBU.

It's because he doesn't want to take responsibility for the chore. So by giving details outloud of what he's doing, he's not the only one to blame if he makes an incorrect decision.

@JoanFrenulum - your op had me laughing out loud. And some of the replies.

That's exactly what I was thinking @LannieDuck
Mine does this a bit and it drives me insane. He also asks me to help him 'just for a sec' almost every time I give him a job to do, I assume for the same reason... I always have to take the mental load of the task even when I've tried to offload the task itself

I just want to blurt out that I’ve already guessed the ending!

I've blurted out the ending once or twice . To be fair it's often so obvious and the story doesn't need to run another 15 minutes.

A recent one started with "you know such-a-person whose daughter has the twins?", then meandered around the daughters age, occupation, hair colour, size of house, location of house etc. I don't know her .

Half way through the story I blurted "oh so is it another set of twins then?"

My mother paused, gave me A Look and said well let me tell you in a huffy tone.

She proceeded to tell the rest of the story with the same amount of irrelevant asides, in the same conspiratorial whisper, before eventually finishing with...............................

AND THEY TOLD HER IT'S TWINS!!.

I do love her but dear god there are times she drives me round the bend.

Monologuing can be a feature of autism. We struggle a bit with the concept of conversation, when to take turns speaking, etc and also tend to assume that if something is fascinating to us, it will be to our audience too! We tend to get obsessed with details, unable to filter out the wood from the trees.
I wonder if at least some of the partners mentioned by PPs might be on the spectrum?

Monologuing can be a feature of autism. We struggle a bit with the concept of conversation, when to take turns speaking, etc and also tend to assume that if something is fascinating to us, it will be to our audience too! We tend to get obsessed with details, unable to filter out the wood from the trees.
Exactly! I've been reading the above posts and thinking what a load of unsympathetic sods you all are.

I find myself doing this sometimes and try hard to stop myself. It's for 2 reasons, one I rarely speak to people and it's hard not to blurt at someone when you literally haven't spoken aloud in over a month. I end up realising I'm trying trying to just get some interaction in while I can, like a sim filling up the social need bar! The other reason is I quite often forget what I started the sentence about, what the point was, I'll say an example of what I mean or something slightly off tangent and have completely forgotten the original point. Then I'll waffle for a bit and either remember or give up, maybe remember later and start all over again! I must be so frustrating but it's 1000x worse being in my head.

Ha ha ha hilarious, I needed this laugh this morning!

I knew someone who used to so this.

I avoided her as much as possible. Or avoided conversation anyway. She also had a tendency to repeat herself. So you got the same fucking monotonous account 3 fucking times if you weren't careful.

Fortunately she was also an oversensitive fucker and took offence very easily over the slightest imagined insults so spent as much time ignoring me as what she did speaking at me.

Couldn't live with it though.

Careful you dont change him into the kind of mumsnet partner so many of us know. The Grunter. How was work today? Grunt. Shall we .......? Grunt. Oh, where are you going? Out. Really, you'll be craving a bit of elaboration in no time.

Oh come on Nike I think we probably know more about our own family members than some random on the internet. I can assure you my mother is not autistic, she's just bored and has little going on in her life so when she does see one of her dc she does this. She's perfectly capable of not monologuing and monopolizing every conversation.

Besides this is an anonymous forum, people are actually allowed to have a little moan about things that irritate.

My heart sinks when I ask certain people a simple yes or no question and they start their answer with "Well,...."

I had a friend who did this.
A simple hello how's work? Would result in an endless monologue about people I didn't know, their dh and dc. How she had x, y and z to sort etc etc.

My DH does this too and it makes me want to tear my own ears off.

Honestly though, it does make me feel a bit trapped and panicky. I strongly suspect he has ADHD though.