Stories

There is a guy at my place of employment who tells way too many stories. Apparently, he used to be a Seabee, and never ceases to remind us. Every time he sees something, it reminds him of a story, and he HAS to tell it. He will go on for hours throughout the day, just telling us of his experiences. I have come to expect to hear the drone of his voice as I am working, and if I don't hear it--it is now uncomfortably quiet. He literally will re-tell the same story over and over, multiple times in a day. 


You might think that an ex-military man has some interesting stories. Yea, sure--he has some interesting ones here and there, but most of them are pointless stories that aren't even funny and have no meaning. Most of them, I guess you just had to be there. 


He is a walking memoir. He always uses the names of the people too, like we should know who they are. Sometimes his stories are a sentence, and sometimes a movie could be adapted from it. Lots of times he will just change the subject to tell a completely irrelevant story, or make extremely vague connections to a story that he just wants to tell. 


Now don't get me wrong; I love telling stories too. I have lots of stories. I could tell you HOURS of stories of things that happened to me. Maybe 5 hours. That's a lot of story telling. Well, actually, considering the fact that I only have a few hours of stories for my nearly 23 years of life (as of today, I have been alive for approximately 201157.584 hours [that means that 5 hours is ~1/40,000th of my current lifespan]), it's kind of unimpressive, but still--I have more stories than most people.


Personally, I get super excited when I start to tell a story. When people are listening, it makes me feel like people actually care about the things that happened to me. I feel like they actually are interested in the experiences that have shaped me as a person; interested in me. Of course, more often than not, I get to the end of this amazing story that I have been building up for 5 minutes and there is a FANTASTIC ending, and I say it, and the person or people that I was telling the story to are completely uninterested. Sometimes they aren't even listening and sometimes they stand there, completely not understanding the humor of the story, or the impact that it  had on my life. It sucks when, something that is important to you, is unaccepted by others.


Maybe that's how this guy feels. He feels alone and is trying to tell the stories of his life so that people will hear them, and become interested and by them, and then become interested in the person that he is.


I mean, personally, I usually like hearing the stories that other people tell. I like to try to imagine what they were feeling and why they made the choices they did, and sometimes put myself in their shoes. Not everyone does though. Most people are too self-centered.


Bluntly put, most people just don't care about the stories that you have to tell, because the story isn't about them.