Lovely weather at the moment. Pity about the weather at the moment. What’s this weather up to at the moment? That ought to be enough small talk to break the ice – or provoke a groan – whatever the weather happens to be doing wherever you happen to be reading this.
Funnily enough, small talk is exactly like the weather: it is everywhere, it is mostly predictable and can drive you around the bend, particularly at this time of year, the dreaded season of the workplace Christmas party. Not that it affects me.
One of the perks of being a semi-retired bum living in the middle of almost nowhere is that I will never have to go to another gawd awful workplace Christmas party for what remains of my semi-retired life.
Some people – psychopathic managers and inebriates mostly – love office Christmas parties. For the psychopathic managers, it’s a team building exercise or an insincere “thank you to staff for all your hard work this year”. For inebriates, it’s – woohoo! – a free drink.
For the rest of us, I suspect, it is something to be endured, an event you are forced by management expectation to attend, where you find yourself making small talk with people you’ve spent the entire year avoiding, actively loathing or feeling completely indifferent to.
Inevitably, this leads – at least it did for me on a number of occasions – to one drinking more than one should to get through the thing, which just as inevitably leads to one saying something one should not have.
The only thing the office Christmas party is actually rather good for is providing, in the years to come, a wealth of anecdotes, some appalling, others hilarious. In the former category, I recall standing next to a very senior NZ Herald staffer, long since retired and hopefully now dead, who, during a Christmas party performance by a staff member’s ukulele band, a group which happened to include a largish woman, muttered to me out of the side of his mouth, “I like them big.” To this day, it makes my skin crawl.
Some years before that, the paper, which had some truly terrible Christmas parties during my 20 years there, held a “nautical” themed end-of-year do. It was on a barge, yes a barge, covered with a marquee tied up at Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour. You entered to find that, dotted around the walls of this giant, empty tent were food and drink stations, and in the centre a low pool of water with an inflatable whale in it, presumably to cheer the awful place up. Eventually, it did.
As the dreary event dragged drearily on, one colleague, clearly unused to wine, snatched up the inflatable whale from the pool and rushed headlong towards an opening on one side of the marquee yelling, “Free Willy!”
She was eventually persuaded, but only just, not to free Willy into the harbour. Willy was returned to his pool. The party went back downhill after that.
I was interested to read a story on RNZ’s website suggesting some people have difficulty with small talk. It included a number of suggestions from, I kid you not, an Oxford University academic on how to improve one’s inane chatter. His radical suggestions included, among other things, using humour to break the ice with a question like (I also kid you not), “If you had to murder someone, who would it be?” At a guess, him probably.
Though I am not an Oxford academic, I am a proficient small talker – this column is pretty much small talk in print – so I, too, would also like to offer advice to those who struggle with small talk at Christmas parties, end-of-year BBQs and the like. It is this: be observant and ask lots questions. That way, the other person has to do most of the talking.
The first thing to do is notice something about your conversation partner, and then – like the Oxford big-shot suggested – use your winning sense of humour to ask questions and get them talking.
For example, you could say, “I have a nephew who wants to be the bore at a BBQ. Do you have any advice I should pass on?” And just like that, the small talk will be under way.
