Planet Sillicon

Trying to be nice

By blog on Jul. 14, 2009.

Do you remember when I wrote of selling my mother’s house because she moved into a retirement community? And how it was a surprisingly quick house sale? Well, because it all went so swimmingly, my SO and I took the estate agent out to dinner to say thank you for his hard work.

It went alright, and it turned out we did have a few common interests. However, he’s one of these people that can’t leave work at work. Every time I run into him or get an email from him, he is always talking about the housing market, and talking about property news, and talking about which areas are selling well at the moment, and talking about what property prices are like at the moment.

Today he sent me an email, and gave me a link to, you won’t believe this, real estate forums… I am surprised that a forum like this would be out there, and that it would have enough activity to keep going… Anyway, so I am trying to be nice, so I told him it looked interesting and that I might join, and then I tried to guide the conversation to a shared interest.

It’s an uncomfortable situation to be in, when you don’t know someone very well, and their primary topic of conversation is one that most people, myself included, have no more than a passing interest in. It makes me want to drop any attempts to be the guys friend, just sort of let the new friendship run it’s short course with no more momentum put in from me, even maybe some brakes put on from my side. It’s really simple, how can you expect a person to continue to communicate with you when you are so fixated on one area of interest, almost to the exclusion of all else?

I don’t know exactly what I am going to do here… I’ve been so busy of late that I don’t have a lot of time for friends anyway, especially not ones that I don’t really know and who are fixated on something so boring! Yeah that decides it, I don’t have the time or the patience to coax a reasonable conversation from this dude. Alright, back to work now.