And Then All I Heard Was "Blah Blah Blah Ginger"

Don't talk to me when I'm talking to somebody else.

I want to hear what you have to say. I want to give you my undivided attention. If I'm trying to listen to two or three people at once, I can't give each person the attention they deserve. And then I feel overwhelmed from trying to keep up, and empty because each conversation was superficial instead of in-depth, and any extra conversational flair was destroyed, and everything that could have been said wasn't, and there was no finality to the conclusion.

I don't care if we're discussing who is driving who where, what you ate for dinner last night, your father's heart attack, or religion. I want to give you my attention. I don't want to feel like a douche for trying to flip from one person to the next, jerking my head back and forth like a defective robot. My attention is not particularily valuable, but if someone wants it for whatever reason, I want to be able to give it to them.

It seems that nobody has a desire to talk to me until, all of a sudden, a few people decide that they all need to say something right this second. And then they start, as if my current conversation doesn't even exist. They just start talking and I get the fun job of deciding who I'd rather listen to.

If you want to talk to someone who is currently talking to somebody else, all you need to do is say "Hey, can I talk to you?", and then wait a moment or two so that they can wrap up whatever they're discussing with the other person. Not acknowledging that two people were talking before you got there is rude and unfair to everybody involved.