Yeh that definitely sucks they’ve rigged it up in a way that’s unusual for this type of work and also forces you in to this situation. Redirecting is good and probably your best option, canny and sensitive people will notice you doing this and take it for the hint that it is but dense or uncaring people will probably carry on steering things in to places you don’t want to go. If you’re forced to eat with them then yes redirecting the conversation will work up to a point but it is a subtle skill to do so non-obviously. It’s hard to advise specifically what to say like a script, though I would say if you just totally ignore the question altogether and switch topic very bluntly it’s going to come across strange and prompt confusion and questioning. You’ll need to somehow maintain the initial thread of their topic as lip service and then turn off down an unrelated avenue fairly smoothly. It’s what politicians do professionally. Reading the other responses to your post I think they’ve got some really good ideas on how to deal with this if you really get forced in to conversing against your will. It’s a subtle art of contributing basically nothing and rephrasing their same question back to them. I think another commenter suggested something along the lines of “I don’t know much about that what about you?” and similarly bland and useless resonses. This is friendly enough not to piss anyone off and lame enough to be totally uninteresting which hopefully invites little follow up. If they continue on their original track, you can combine this with seguing to another topic.

I didn’t suggest this to you initially because it doesn’t sound like your natural style and I think advice is best if it allows the recipient to handle things mostly in their own way while helping to avoid pitfalls in doing so. I guess you’ll have to navigate this daily frustration in a way a little outside of your comfort zone by carefully appearing to engage whilst really not and hopefully they’ll find you so boring they don’t bother anymore. Hopefully you don’t mind this giving the impression that you’re a boring person to the remaining 50% of your peers that don’t bother you so much but sometimes it’s a necessary evil.

I think the doughnut thing is actually just some folks wanting a laugh and trying to be witty. The phrase made sense as it was intended and was taken as such (a person from Berlin), and the fact that there is coincidentally also a doughnut given that name is unlikely to have registered in anyone’s mind while present at the speech and if it did it probably wouldn’t have merited much more than a smirk since it’s not a mistake to have said that, it’s just a funny coincidence.

I’m sure there’s probably more than one pizzeria somewhere with a pizza on the menu called “New Yorker” and if someone said in a speech “I’m a New Yorker” no one’s going to pissing themselves laughing at the person for being such a baffoon to have accidentally called themselves a pizza.

The guy seems to be able to sweet talk his way in to any room and convince people to do and say the most humiliating things on camera. If him being British become an issue I think he can just act his way out of it and somehow everyone will believe him in spite of it being a publicly known fact.

You’ll likely run in to a little bit of trouble because you’re having to make explicit what would have been better for them to have inferred and when it’s made explicit like that, it will come across as very weird to people and they’ll probably have some trouble not taking it personally (even if they shouldn’t).

Some understanding of the general tenor of how this group talks would make for better ways to communicate what you want to say but as general advice, your proposed ways of addressing this seem like they’re on the right track in spirit but you’re phrasing them in ways that imply a note of contempt.

This is probably because you really do harbour some contempt for these guys given the way you described them, like calling them childish for example. If you actually want to express some of that animosity then your suggestions are probably fine but if you’re concerned about the “right” way to set these boundaries you might want to try and keep it neutral. This is also good if you don’t want to earn their contempt either which is probably advisable even if you don’t like them very much since you have to work with them and if they feel offended and hold a grudge it could risk spilling over in to the actual work.

I like your idea of saying outright that you’re not a talkative person, hopefully they’ll feel a little guilty about having forced you in to having to say that and will not try to drag you in to the conversation so much from then on. The additional bits around that concept don’t seem advisable, you don’t have to chastise them for not realising you don’t want to talk, that’s likely to be unproductive, the point is you don’t want to talk. Similarly the “and I hope you respect that” addition is good for being firm but also comes across a little aggressive, best deployed only if you’ve already made your wishes explicit and they’re clearly not respecting that.

Eating elsewhere, if that’s an option is great, it you can already opt for that do it, you can avoid even having to bring anything up and the physical separation makes questioning you about it really inconvenient. If they ask you about it later that’s when you can say you need time to unwind and that’s also by far the most socially acceptable and understandable reason that people are less likely to take personally. I don’t know if you resent the idea that your reasons have to be socially acceptable to these guys or should have to be massaged to avoid them taking things personally, but ask yourself this: do you want to teach them a lesson and demonstrate your contempt for them, or do you want to just be left alone to work and to continue to work effectively with them? Pragmatism over principle would make sense here.

If it gets to the point where you have to actually say to another adult, in a work environment, “leave me alone” then odds are it probably won’t even work and your coworkers are complete idiots that need to be fired. However if that’s really the case, saying that, even if it doesn’t work is probably good since at that point things are probably going to escalate and at least no one can say you did or said anything inappropriate.

In short, take the easiest route if possible and just eat somewhere else at lunch and redirect the conversation back to work if they keep talking to you during work. If you end up somehow having absolutely no other remaining options but to explicitly tell them you don’t want to talk be careful to communicate in a way so you only express this simple desire and don’t imply some sort of judgement or contempt towards them. Try to be nice about it.

They do many many useful things and the utility is valuable enough to begrudgingly have to accept the frustrating experience of using them. We generally really do have to accept it as well because as with all useful technologies, they become ubiquitous and then useful technologies are built off the fact of their reliable ubiquity and then those technologies replace existing ones and you find yourself needing smartphones to get by in society. They’re close to a necessity if not in reality, a necessity where I live, but places like China for example it is simply impossible to go about life without one. I honestly don’t what people do there when their phone is broken, just getting out the door to pick up a new one would be a challenge.

This is a tough one, I’m going to guess Marx?

I don’t see why that moment was unsalvagable, the whole back story not withstanding, people get startled when woken, and it’s usually only momentary. Were there no words spoken or anything?

Not gonna lie, I was pretty excited to find out what apple fries were before realising you just sliced up sticks of raw apple and put it on a plate. Looks like a nice sandwich in any case. Got that nice Hotel Food look.

The trend was to make the phone as small as possible and it would have been hard to do that with extra keys. You could make them smaller keys, but then it’s almost as hard to use just by virtue of being too tiny tiny to type on.

I always thought t9 was pretty great but I do remember it being frustrating when you needed to type something it was never going to get and it wasn’t always convenient to switch to regular keying temporarily.

Probably shouldn’t confirm that the address was correct.

Could you just actually drink coffee? I mean I guess the caffeine isn’t necessarily the best for situations of anxiety, but I find a cup of coffee really relaxing and if it helps when it looks like you’re drinking it I wonder if really drinking it wouldn’t help similarly.

Yeh but then, if a person is genuinely obviously extremely attractive, or clearly has traits like a capacity to lead or influence people, or is objectively wealthy, or is clearly very smart, those are all things that come off as really conceited to the rest of us unless their acknowledgement is very careful. If such a person is too quick or too ready to acknowledge these things about themselves, despite their accuracy, we’re pretty likely to think they’re a dick. It seems like for people who are in some ways exceptional, the appropriate level of humility, wherever it is on the scale, does need to involve at least a little bit of pantomime and false modesty. The right size in such cases will need to be at least a little smaller than they really are, not too much smaller, or it’s interpreted as disingenuous, but not exactly true to scale either.

Modals make me so godamned angry.

Ayyye!

So is this intended as kind of a metaphor or is this mainly aimed at people who have literally stepped in real shit?

Empire Records just felt good and I think it could pull that off with a crowd.

But why would they not have thought of doing this before. I haven’t noticed this uptick at least in my country but I’m curious now OP has asked. It’s strange that they’ve decided now that they could prey on people’s insecurities when it’s been an option all along and it’s largely already what they do anyway.

Is it a function of the training data and how these generative AIs work, or are the prompters creating these images always saying something like “hot” or “big tits”? Because even images like these where the focus is presumably meant to be the fantasy world setting, almost always make a point of creating at least slightly sexy images of women with big breasts.

Hope that’s not an onion article

Yes, but in the context of the comment to which I’m replying, I say scare quotes because the commenter has interpreted editorial intent behind the choice of how and where the punctuation has been used beyond simply establishing that the word is a direct quote.

While I kind of disagree with what that intent is, hence my reply to them, I agree with the original commenter that there is reason to believe the quotation marks served more purpose in that headline than simple punctuation. As a quote, it’s an odd choice, given it’s a single word long, conveys nothing that the sentence without the marks couldn’t have said and used to complete a sentence that is otherwise entirely constructed by the author.

I and the person to which I replied have interpreted this choice as a form of editorial commentary upon the reasoning behind the policy being discussed in the article. In the original commenter’s case they’re taking it to mean that the article’s author thinks the premise of iphones having security problems is so absurd that the people claiming such must be crazy (which the commenter obviously does not agree with). I don’t take from it such an extreme implication, although I do read some kind of implied commentary and given that this security concern has nuance to it that a headline would struggle to convey, I have suggested perhaps that that punctuation is serving to subvert or undermine the supposed security concern in some way. When that writing technique is employed, the punctuation is referred to as scare quotes.

Or you know, we’re just reading tea leaves and it’s just a one word quote, but there’s the rationale for you at least so you know why I chose that term specifically.