I was in an African country (and I won’t name names or
tribes either) in a fairly remote location with two people from our national
team. Someone asked for a ride to the
town where we were going about 4.5 hours away and the team agreed. Personally, I don’t mind providing this type
of assistance to someone, especially if we know him, which we did.
However, we were about 20 minutes into the drive when I
realized that this guy had not stopped talking since he got into the
vehicle. Now I was in a meeting with him
earlier that day and he was the one who complained that he felt excluded as the
meeting was being held in English for my benefit. Not only did he complain, but went on and on
to the extent that I thought it was probably a mercy that the meeting was in
English or the talk would be never ending.
No kidding, this guy talked 2.5 hours non-stop, until he ran
out of water. When he slowed down enough
to ask for some, our team obliged. (Big
mistake.) This did lead to about a 1
hour interlude where some questions went back and forth, with the other two
team members involved. Maybe he was just
building another head of steam.
Sure enough, finding ourselves still about 1 hour from our
destination, he seemed to take note that he would soon be losing his captive
audience and launched into another half hour interlude, where he not only asked
and answered his own question, like du, du, du, 2008. Eh? Uhu, 2008, blah, blah, blah. He laughed at his own jokes and the rest of
the team sat generally mute with the occasional grunt to indicate they were not
comatose. One finally asked for the
radio to be turned on which temporarily quieted the output, but alas, we were
still too far out of range to get a good station.
When we parted he said, “Good travels, it was nice traveling
with you.” What can you say to
that? The phrase that had earlier come
to mind was, “Thank you for coming and thank you for leaving.” Of course that went unsaid. :-)
