To tell her it’s boring

[AntoinetteNoCake]

(Light hearted) So my friend is such a lovely person, we’ve been friends for about 15 years now and seen each other through lots of trials and tribulations (although probably I’ve always been the more supportive one). She started a job working in an accounts type role about 5 years ago and has done brilliantly well, she started on reception and worked her way up, I’m really proud of her. The problem is, it’s all she talks about. Every conversation 5 minutes in turns to talking about work. The people, the job, her deadlines, the intricacies of various parts of the job, what people have said to her, things she’s completed etc. it’s as if I’ve said ‘so how’s work? Tell me all about it!’ As lovely as she is, it’s making me want to avoid her. I’ve tried steering the conversation away, I’ve tried saying ‘wow your job sounds pretty boring’ (which is actually quite rude😂) But she just keeps doing it. If I were to tell her outright to stop talking about it I feel like she’d be quite hurt. So what do I do? Be blunt or put up with it to my own detriment as it’s really annoying me (for context, I work in a listening type MH role so am probably a bit fed up of listening to things that I don’t always want to) WWYD?

I recently had to tell my friend that they were talking about work constantly as it would be late and night and they’d be on the phone chatting away about their job. It was absolutely relentless so I asked them why it was on their mind so much and made them aware of how much they were going on about it.

Try taking it in turns to do ‘High, Low, Buffalo’.
You share the high point of your day, then the low point, then something completely random. Then swap. We do this with the DC at dinner too. It gives the conversation some boundaries if they’re needed.
You could Google some questions to take the conversation about work a bit wider / deeper too so it doesn’t get stuck on the minutiae.

I think she’s at a point in her life where her work is a huge part of her identity. She doesn’t do much apart from that, doesn’t really go anywhere, only seems to really speak to me and 2 other people (plus work colleagues I guess!) so I guess that’s her main thing to talk about because there’s not much else going on!

How did they respond?

Redirect the conversation after a set time you can tolerate “Right, that’s enough talk about work, I spend enough of my week thinking about that, what you got planned for the weekend?”

I try really hard not to talk about work because its a large part of my identity and I know its boring for others! And I actually want a break from it too. I had a friend who I used to work with and somehow we'd always talk about work and I found it boring/relentless! Trying to change the topic was my tactic and it was moderately successful. "OMG sorry to interrupt but I meant to tell you who I saw last week" or some such!

My ds 22 has been talking about work non stop, he calls me at lunchtime to download and then spend a good hour afterwards and then over dinner and again if I see him - he's stressed and his work is hard but he talks about the same things every day - I have tried to put time limits on him but he gets huffy and storms off only to come back talking about the same thing again - my head is about to explode. I've tried to steer him to discussing high level issues, tried to get him to go for a walk to switch off but he just keeps downloading on me. It's exhausting.

I think @BennyHenny is right - try redirecting the conversation. After 5 mins of work talk I would try and steer it in a different direction. Have some other topics lined up in case you dry up and she goes back to work! Ultimately I think you may have to just say "No more work talk" but be aware this could upset her.

Next time you are due to meet up, could you tell her beforehand 'please can we have an evening where we don't talk about work at all? My job is really doing my head in and I could really do with an evening where neither of us talk about work?'

Tell her to button it unless she’s going to become a circus ringmaster or a celebrity psychiatrist or something actually mildly interesting. I can’t stand people who wang on about their jobs, it really is the height of tedium.

I had a friend like this - was a dancer - all i heard about was dancing which I have no interest in
I do not see her now I decided there was no point as I did not want to talk about her and her job all day

I was literally about to say the same thing. Your friend needs something else to talk about

Perhaps the two of you could take up a new crazy hobby? Or go and do somethiny wild!

You might try saying how stressed she sounds and how work has overtaken her life, and ask her whether she minds this, and what she would be doing if she wasn't so focused on her job. Then in she continues talk about work, you could say 'There you go again - it's as if work is the only thing in your life at the moment. Is that true?'

Of you could try just listening in silence rather than giving her any encouragement to keep talking.

One of my oldest friends talks endlessly about her grandchildren. I can tell you it is just as boring as someone who talks about their job incessantly. Like you, I don’t know how to stop her without offending her. I ask about other things but she just returns to the subject.

Yes! Exactly this

Does she not have family, hobbies, holidays, tv she watched?
I think your options are put up, tell her to stop or start seeing her less.

I would just say “yes very good sarah, did you see x on tv last night? Or hows the hobby going?”

One of my friends can be like this. He tells such long boring work stories. He’s recently started managing a small team and he’s proud of himself for getting to that level which is great, but he loves to bleat on about it. Once I dared suggest we move on from work chat and he got really offended and said he didn’t realise I was able to dictate what we talked about 🙈

Could you maybe 'share the blame' a bit, just to save her feelings? Maybe "Gosh, we're getting boring in our old age, we've talked about nothing but work all night" then ask if she's seen anything good on Netflix or whatever?

Perfect! I’m going to try this

Everyone's a little boring sometimes - who knows, maybe even you - can't you just gently steer the conversation onto other topics?

Oh, god, someone I know does this. Recently I met up with her and a mutual friend, and she was at it for about half an hour, huge amounts of detail along the lines of '... and then Ian, of course, told us all about the big issue with Acquisitions, and Sharon from Acquisitions obviously thought it was all about what happened last month, so you couldn't even add the percentage charges on, and Jane and I would have had to get out the Standard Deduction forms even just to audit it, so naturally Ian will have to go to John to sort things out ...'

Honestly, from the way she was talking I assumed our mutual friend had an intricate knowledge of this work and all the people involved. And she was doing a good job nodding and smiling. So I zoned out, assuming they were catching up.

Nope, turns out our mutual friend knew absolutely nothing about this job either!

My DH used to do this incessantly. I wouldn't have minded if it was a bit more about people and personalities but it was all the technicalities of it and recounting conversations he'd had verbatim. It was so boring. I rarely used to talk about my job because it was way over his head🤣.
He's been retired now for a few years and spends vast amounts of time doom scrolling twitter and making pronouncements about 'current affairs' expecting me to agree with him and be affronted.
I think wistfully back to those days when he just wittered on about his job.

I had a friend who did this. Absolute minutiae of her office processes, interwoven with all the grievences and slights she felt on the receiving end of. It was torture.

DH talks about work a lot, but he has a genuinely interesting and quite high pressure job and most of it is soap opera stuff about the various characters - and he's funny, and not telling it from a victim perspective.

This really made me laugh…..that’s EXACTLY what it’s like! 😂