Chat room

You know them. You’ve met them. You probably have one or more in your life right now.

The Never-Ending Talker. The person who operates under the principle silence is the enemy, and words must flow like a broken fire hydrant in July.

The good news is you never have to worry about holding up your end of the conversation. In fact, you don’t even have to participate. You can just nod, throw in the occasional “oh wow” or “that’s crazy” or “Can you believe it?” and they’ll take it as a heartfelt invitation to continue.

The bad news is they can’t take a hint. You can start backing away, inching toward the exit and they will follow. You can check your watch. Fake a phone call. Hail a taxi, hop in, roll up the window and drive off and without a doubt they’ll already be in the passenger seat, mid-sentence.

If you find yourself trapped in an endless monologue, here are some survival tactics:

1. The Mirror Technique – Repeat their last sentence back to them as a question. This creates a loop that momentarily stuns them.

2. The Strategic Yawn – Yawning is contagious. If they start yawning too, there’s a slight chance they’ll pause to wonder why they suddenly feel exhausted.

3. The Sudden Fake Emergency – “Oh no! I forgot I left the oven on in 2007! Gotta go!”

4. The Disappearing Act – If all else fails, just vanish. Learn the fine art of the Irish Goodbye—slipping away unnoticed while they’re still mid-sentence. Don't worry about offending them. People have been slowly backing away from them all their lives - they're used to it. They might not even realize you’re gone until they finish their story, which could take anywhere from 20 minutes to several lifetimes.

You have to admire their stamina. But at the same time, you have to be wishing there was an off switch. We all have chatty friends like this, and it doesn’t make them bad people.

I don’t know what your position on this is. Mine is next to the nearest exit.

The rude of the problem

Being interrupted is right up there on my list of pet peeves, along with paper straws, napkins made from recycled material and one-ply toilet tissue.

I think it stems from the ugly-American-in-a-foreign-land practice of thinking if you just talk louder and repeat the same thing over and over, they'll understand what you're talking about. Even though they speak a different language.

Not always, but much more often than I'd like, I work in an industry that runs on equal measure of rudeness, ego, asinine comments, loud and I know better than you do.

It usually goes like this. You'll be in a conference room, either on your first or thirty-seventh meeting of the day. You have the floor and you're speaking. Without warning or reason, someone starts talking over you. Then another person joins the chorus. Pretty soon, they're not all just trying to talk over you, they're also jockeying to talk over each other.

They don't hear or care what you're saying, because, you know, what they're saying is So. Much. More. Important. It's like those drivers on the freeway who're behind you, pass you, then pull in front of you because that one car length makes All. The. Difference.

I hate those people. And I hate when it happens - in meetings, on the road and in real life.

Apparently I'm not the only one in advertising who hates this. Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, principals at the Kaplan Thaler agency in New York, wrote a book called The Power of Nice. In it, they point out the many times being nice in business has turned potential clients into actual ones. By the way, that's not the reason they suggest being nice - it's just a side benefit.

Don't get me wrong. There are many pleasant, decent, courteous people in the business who are just as frustrated by the rudeness and bad upbringing all too frequently on display.

They're just not in my meetings.

Who's doing the talking here

I've always had a morbid fascination with ventriloquists. What other kind of fascination could you have with them?

Years ago, I was freelancing for the Fox Family Channel. One of the programs I had to write about was a special called the World Of Magic that was filmed at the Hollywood Palladium. I went to the show, and saw a lot of poofy sleeves, tired doves and startled looking rabbits.

But towards the end, there was a magician that had a grotesque looking mask on his face. He removed it, and underneath was another mask. And another one. And another one. He was pulling them off one after the other at an insane speed. He must've had fifty masks on.

I turned to the girl sitting next to me and said, "I'm going to go out on a limb and say he had a pretty screwed up childhood." She said, "If you think that's messed up, you ought to see the vents." By vents she meant ventriloquists. Come to find out she was Erica Larsen, daughter of the founder of the Magic Castle. We talked for a bit, and she told me about all the vents that performed at the Castle.

I was hooked. I decided then and there I was going to make a documentary showing the bizarre world of ventriloquists.

I met Erica at the Castle for lunch and told her the idea. She liked it a lot, and said she'd be happy to connect me with some vents. I also wound up going to the International Ventriloquist Convention in Las Vegas, where I shot a lot of video and interviewed many of the participants.

One of the things I remember most is the woman who'd only talk or answer question through her dummy.

It's a little surprising I could even look at a ventriloquist dummy after a prank my roommate Ned pulled on me years ago.

Ned owned a Jerry Mahoney dummy he knew creeped me out. He also knew I got up in the night to go to the kitchen. So he put the dummy on the kitchen counter right next to the frig. That night, about two in the morning, I went to the frig. I believe there's still a hole in the ceiling from when I saw the dummy sitting there.

And of course, I still get a chill thinking about the Twilight Zone episode pictured above, where a ventriloquist dummy is alive, eventually changing places with his owner - Cliff Robertson.

Anyway, add my documentary on ventriloquists to the list - along with accordion lessons, several screenplays, helicopter flying lessons and marathon training - of things I've started and never finished.

But the idea haunts me, and I imagine eventually I'll come back to it. After all the time and thought I've given it over the years, I'd be a dummy not to.