Talking Nonsense

Everyone talks nonsense at some point or the other.

But what do you do if you have a person you have to constantly interact with, and of the total conversation he is having with you, only 2% is relevant information.

It seriously pisses me off to approach him on any topic, simply because of the 15 or 20 minutes I spend with him, only 1 minute is useful and this happens all the time, everytime.

"Anand, that report is running so slowly. It takes 20 minutes. If it takes so much time, thats all. What will the stakeholders do, waiting for this report to complete. If you ask me, you can have couple of coffee breaks simply waiting for the report. Imagine someone sitting and staring at the system, just waiting for the report to finish. They spend so much money on the development of these things and then someone comes with such a slow code. Again waste of money while these people sit no. We have to look into it and improve the performance"

Of this, the only useful relevant information for me was that "20 minutes" detail. Ah God! I mean, even I have made useless statements like these on numerous occassions, so its not like I am proclaiming that I am a no-nonsense man. But EVERYTIME? Drives me crazy.

Everytime I go through such conversations with anybody, I always remember a small conversation that happened in my college:
There was this friend of mine, B, a topper from the computer science department. He is always used to answering all the questions and scoring top marks all the time. And after a particular exam, we all met at the canteen, and along with us was a topper from the Electronics & Communication Dept, lets call him S. B was terribly depressed that for the first time in many years, he didnt answer all questions. When S asked B what the matter was, B said "Dont even ask! I did not write the answers for the last 2 questions in the 16 marks section. I did not have the time to finish and I had to hand over the paper without finishing my answers which I knew by heart" etc etc and went on and on to complain. S listened to it all and at the end of it said "If you had said you couldnt complete the paper, that would have been enough for me as an answer for my question to you. Maybe you answered your other questions in the exam the same way you answered mine now!"

The look on B's face was priceless.