I’m an introvert and I like going to work to do my job and go home. I don’t understand people who use a job as a substitute for friendship or marriage. It’s a means to an end.
The sooner I do my duties, the longer my downtime is going to be, and I love having my downtime.
Many of my colleagues see me and immediately start asking questions I don’t want to answer, but neither do I want to hurt their feelings, I mostly want to be left alone. In the past this has been deconstructed as arrogance and people with fragile egos feel insulted by my indifference to them and that I prefer to work than to talk to them.
The world is made by extroverts. I have observed that people are eager to help you if you give them attention. I don’t get it, but neither I’m not going to change how extroverts think or feel.
If I give them the attention they need for as long as they need it I’m going to end up with daily headaches and neither my job nor theirs is going to be done.
I want to appear approachable, but keeping the info I feed them to a minimum. How do I do that?
What do you talk about to your coworkers?
What do you say to stop conversation organically? (meaning they don’t get offended).
Here’s a Midwestern trick for you. Find a lull in the conversation, then use the word “Welp!” and then press your lips together into that flat emoji face 😐. Generally that’s all you need to say to indicate, “regretfully, I need to move on from this interaction now”, and both parties can give their requisite goodbyes before dispersing. If that didn’t get the hint across, throw in a “Alright, well, I’m gonna let you get back to it”, which obviously sounds nicer than “you need to release me from the conversation chokehold you’ve got me in and let me get back to it”, but means the same thing. If they keep talking after that, then they’re the asshole and you can now directly shut down the conversation without the stigma. But don’t forget to apologize for needing to do something other than entertain them and ask their permission to do otherwise, and then thank them when they grant your reprieve. Something like, “Sorry, if it’s alright, I really need to buckle down on this. Can we chat later? Thank you!”
This submissive, conflict-avoidance, time-management solution technique is brought to you courtesy of generations of the painfully polite and non-confrontational interacting with the overly friendly and chatty that defines the culture and the history of the Midwest. In Indiana, that’s as much a daily fixture of our way of life as riding past corn fields stretched to the horizon, the joy of confirming from their license plate that the shitty driver is indeed a Buckeye, and a general obsession with basketball that borders on psychosis.