Help! How Can I Get Rid of My Commuting Buddy?
Writing in the Globe and Mail, David Eddie hears from a reader who's a little tired of a chatty, fellow commuter. Is there a polite way to give them the heave? The reader explains:
My daily commute includes three hours on a train. Some months ago, I had a nice chat with a seatmate who mentioned being new to my area. After chatting again a few days later, he said he and his wife would love to have my husband and me over for a drink. I hesitantly accepted. Drinks turned into dinner, during which my husband and I realized that we have little in common with this couple. But we were friendly – and now I’m stuck. He refers to me as his “train buddy,” sits next to me every morning and keeps talking about getting together again. He seeks my advice on matters about which I have no expertise or interest: his job, his in-laws, his kid’s weight. How can I shake him loose?
Eddie's advice:
God, I can just see it.
Every morning, your eyes locking, horribly, as you board the train. Him coming over to sit next to you with a hearty, hey-there grin. You squirming, toes pinching each other inside your shoes as, with excruciating slowness, he unpacks his duffel bag of troubles: how tough it is to be new in town, how bored his wife is, how chunky his kid is getting.
Meanwhile, out the window, the landscape, like your life, rolls inexorably into the past.
Your daily torment has an almost Sisyphean quality. I think I can picture it all so clearly because it’s like something that would happen to me.
Except it wouldn’t, any more. Because, over the years, I have trained myself with ninja-like discipline in the art of advance detection and avoidance of bores and boring situations and am now a 7th Dan Shaolin/Jedi master.
I moonwalk out of rooms. It’s like I was never there. I melt into shadows, blend into murals. I blow a fine dust in your face and you forget we ever met.
I even have the ability, when a stiff is headed my way at a party, to grab a nearby blanket and wrap it around myself, and – poof! – suddenly the blanket falls to the ground, empty.
Unfortunately, I may have to impart the nuts and bolts of these Shaolin secrets in another column, because in your case it’s too late.
You already have a life-force-draining, barnacle-like bore attached to you. ...
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