Talking about Talking

By nature, I wasn’t a talkative person. As a child I had neighbors tell me that I should talk more if I wanted to survive…am sure I would be giving them a shock if they see me talking now…the reason, I am talking more than ever before. One main reason is that in my workplace, there is a great emphasis on communication. Add to that the fact that some people confuse plain talk and communication, we are encouraged to talk, in the name of “communication”. In fact, my first performance review here, had one remark in this aspect. It was that I should be more vocal in the team, and more vocal I am.

In spite of this, there are times when I can't get myself talk to certain people. I don’t know what stops me. I am not able to find a reason. I am really clueless. But there are people with whom I find it highly impossible to hold a decent conversation.

There was this person here in one of our teams, and the job flow was such that I would have to interact with him (he was one among ~40 people in the teams I was working with). Since the day I joined, I wasn’t able to say a word to this person. Not even wish for courtesy sake…if we were working on a document, all that I would say would be perfect official talk regarding the document…as days went by, I got to realize that he wasn’t a good character, both on the job and out of it….he would talk crap and his work would not be of good quality. In spite of the kind of work he was doing, he would talk as if he was the best in town.

Almost a year later, I found another friend who said she had a similar feeling toward him. I was surprised. Till then, I had thought that it was some sort of a premonition that I had…something that forewarned me about his nature….but to find this in another person? We could only assure each other that we were not alone in this issue. Finally, he was laid off due to misconduct.

This is not the only incident. It is one among the many. There are a number of times, when I talk to someone and feel that person is not honest with me…in fact, nowadays if I feel the same way as I felt when I saw this fellow for the first time, I take it as a warning sign.

All the same, I have to admit that this doesn’t work all the time….

There are others who become my friends, these are people with whom I would feel comfortable…. There are some among this group of friends, a select few with whom I could talk about anything and everything. There is a friend who stands out in this respect. He mailed me once, I ignored the mail. Then he mailed again and I replied. Think we chatted just once and then we were talking on the phone and we were sharing so much of our lives uncensored… There is this particular day that would remain in my memory… That night we started talking and we stopped only when he fell asleep early in the morning…that was the amount we spoke and all along we were talking about everything we could think of…a wide range of topics…

Again, I have no idea why we spoke so much. We were strangers to each other just a few moments ago…and then here we are chatting away as if we had known each other for a lifetime…and in recent times there is this friend to whom I send a Long mail everyday and I receive an equally long one…

What makes me be so open with him? Well, what makes me talk? I have no idea