"How does someone politely end a conversation with a person who won't stop talking?"
Slowly But Surely...
"Worst case I’ve ever had, I basically gave every verbal cue I knew of, eventually stood up, then stood in the doorway, then backed out of the doorway, and this dude was still talking."
'In the end I just said ‘I’ll be back’ and closed the door on him mid-sentence."- delpigeon
Sometimes You Have To Cut In...
"Mental health worker here."
"I see patients every day who will talk forever if you don't stop them."
"You simply have to interrupt and redirect/or end the conversation."
"I always politely tell them, 'let me stop you there' or 'Let me jump in there'."
"Sometimes you have to be abrupt or else you will be held hostage by the one sided conversation."- DeadSharkEyes
Noises In Your Head...
"'Ssshh! Do you hear that??'"
"'No?'"
"'One Sec', and just run off."- i_f*ckin_luv_it_mate
Puppet What GIF by Gerbert!GiphyMy Ride Is Waiting...
"I'm an Uber driver, I was once summoned to pick up two people for just this reason."
"They had me drive four blocks/.25 miles/1.5 minutes to another bar just to get out of a conversation with someone."
"Minimum fare ($3.75) and $10 tip on the app."- verminiusrex
Slightly Outdated...
"I have to return some video tapes"- LeMarcusKing
You're Really Helping Each Other Out...
"I don't mean to interrupt but-"
"It's got to be done, so just do it."
"They need a break anyway."- p1um5mu991er
Awkward Cringe GIF by MASTERPIECE | PBSGiphyWho Are You Again?
“'Ann was getting a little chummy. When people get too chummy with me, I like to call them by the wrong name to let them know I don't really care.' - Ron Swanson."- Pyre_Aurum
Just Be Straightforward
"I read one of those mildly interesting newspaper features recently with an 'etiquette expert', their advice was rather than make an excuse, you should be more direct that you are ending the conversation and say something like 'I've really enjoyed talking with you, I'm going to circulate around the room now' as it's less likely to create an expectation you might come back."
"It does work too!"- Boyleingbass
Reverse Psychology, The Irish Way!
"We have a great line that we use in Ireland."
"I haven't heard it used abroad but it could well be used all over for all I know."
"The person is rabbiting on and is showing no sign of stopping."
"You clearly and firmly say 'I'll let you go'."
"Then with the confidence of a person doing them a favor, you turn on your heel and stride away."
"This has the effect of making them think you are the one wanting to avoid wasting their time."
"If they figure it out they can't call you out on it because to do so would be to admit, at least to themselves, that they are wasting your time."
"In fact most people never allow themselves to think it might be them who is holding you up so they accept the 'offer' of your leaving in order for them to get on with their important work."
"In general if someone says 'I'll let you go' to me, rare but it has happened, I smile and say bye and end the conversation."
"It is a social convention and I abide by it."
"They want out."
"No ego."
"Let them go and the best of luck to them."
"People appreciate that I imagine."- Nuffsaid98
let it go GIFGiphyOf course, all of the above are ways of telling people whom you presumably do want to see again, one day, to stop talking
If you never want to be on the receiving end of someone talking, a simple "shut up" should prove quite effective.
I haven't tried these rooms yet. Not sure I want to. Highly claustrophobic. Convince me...
No touching...
"I used to work at one. I can’t tell you how many people thought that power outlets were a prop and tried to stick keys into them. Guys. There was a lamp plugged into it and a 'do not touch, not a part of the game' sticker on it. It’s not a trick, don’t do that."
brasscassette
Shackles
"A friend of mine works for an escape room and he told me one about a puzzle where the key to the next door was shackled to a desk by a combination lock. What you are supposed to do is figure out the combination for the lock from the clues around the room to free the key. What one group decided to do instead was get a guy on each corner and pick up the 150 pound desk and carry it across the room, slide the key into the lock, and then rotate the entire desk to unlock the door."
sharrrper
'Yale'
"I am not an escape room employee but I did a lot of em and talked to the employees often. One of them told me there was a simple lock (opened by a key) that had 'Yale' written on it (the name of the lock company) and a lady (not native English speaker) thought it read 'yell' and legit shouted 'OPEN!!' at it, expecting it to open."
Dorza1
searching the fountain...
"Recently went to an escape room with my co-workers. Before we started, we were explicitly warned not to touch or drink the bright blue water coming out of a fountain because it would turn our skin blue - clearly people had tried searching the fountain as part of the escape room previously and now they have to warn everyone."
babers1987
Voice of God
Whos That Voice Of God GIF by Shark WeekGiphy"I was in an escape room once where one puzzle involved some objects that needed to be manipulated inside a structure that made it very awkward."
"We were all looking at it trying to figure out how to proceed when I said 'Well, the bottom is held on with screws and I have a screwdriver in my purse, but that would probably be cheating.' Instantly the Voice of God came over the intercom 'THAT WOULD BE CHEATING!' So we didn't do that..."
Miss_Speller
Well people really do get creative at this game... don't they?
Reverse
genius GIFGiphy"Had a group of engineers who were familiar with the style of the lock effectively reverse engineer the lock. They showed us how they did it afterwards."
Snowf1ake222
Smoked...
"When I was in one they told us several times that the fire extinguisher is NOT part of the puzzle. They said it so many times, I'm 98% sure someone once used it lol."
Zirael_Swallow
"I always wait to see if they say not to disassemble smoke detectors, if they have that warning, I ask about it, and every time they will always have a story about a dumby who ignored the warning labels and disassembled the smoke detector."
cleverplaydoh
Group of 4
"There was a story on here a while ago about a guy in a group of four who took a broom from the first room because 'it had to be for something.' He said it looked too out of place to not be needed. Well he was half right. It was out of place but that's because it was the broom used by employees to clean the room."
"It was simply forgotten when they cleaned last time. The guys giving hints thought it was hilarious that this guy carried a broom through four rooms expecting it to be the key to their escape at some point. I thought that was funny as hell."
PCCoatings
Damages...
"Take in a screwdriver and dismantling furniture or taking doors off hinges... all the while we specifically tell them not to use force and that furniture is just furniture. Though I don't care cause they gotta pay the damages. Also had some groups press our panic button cause that opens all the doors (for emergency cases)."
"So they can skip puzzles and be faster. Makes zero sense to us cause they are paying for an hour of playtime and to solve puzzles, not like the prize is reduced cause you solved less in fewer minutes. Especially since our prices aren't cheap."
karmasabitterpill
Idiots
Idiot Facepalm GIFGiphy"Breaking EVERYTHING. Trying to eat or drink things they should totally not be trying to eat or drink."
Radiant-Comb9058
Perfect Pitch
"My brother and sister once did an escape room where they fell behind 45 minutes in to their one hour limit. Then my brother sat down at the piano and just played the background music that was on (he has perfect pitch). This happened to be the code to open the final door."
B1ue_zangoose
Are you crazy!?
"I did a spy thriller which had a chalk board. Trouble is, 3 of the 4 of us were scientists. A chalkboard full of equations?! Clearly this meant something. Now. In hindsight. It seems unlikely that any puzzle designer would expect you have the working knowledge to solve quadratic equations. Or that you'd need anything but the most basic of mathematical skills."
"So that was our first error. The second error was when our friend (fiancé of one of the three scientists and only non scientist of the bunch) immediately goes to erase the board with its immaculate display of complicated formulae and equations. She was immediately wrestled to the ground."
"Sheer panic. No dignity. Are you crazy!? You don't just erase someones chalkboard!!! Full blown PTSD of Uni is the play here. Lo and behold. Erasing the board revealed some unerasableble text, spelling out the clue. We felt bad for that one. She was right."
Kenobi_01
Numbers
"We were supposed to find the numbers to a padlock. My boss had guessed the answer within 5 minutes."
Th3_Accountant
"I had to do this once. In a poorly designed room, one of the padlocks needed to be open by a hint that led to a 5 letter word, but the lock only had 4 digits so the designers of the room just took the last letter off of the word and spelt it wrong. We were trying real 4 letter words and couldn't figure it out so I just started guessing and eventually got it."
ObsquatuIate
Digits
code GIFGiphy"Not an employee... but my group once was so bad that we solved the room by fully misunderstanding the concept and we ended up getting the five digit code to the lockbox via some truly failed logic that shouldn't have worked."
xeothought
Water Levels
"One of the puzzles is opened at the start of the room to reveal a large jug of water with a floating key, but the water level is too low for you to reach it. As you progress through the room you get smaller canteens to fill up the jug. Bachelor party comes in already tipsy, orders multiple drinks as they progress through the room, and at some point one of them pees into the jug to raise the water level. This is what made me leave for another job. If you ever go to an escape room, just know we're judging you for every move you make."
Xenomorph_Queen
Your UV
"I was in a room once with a puzzle that required UV light - and you did find a UV torch somewhere. Problem was, the batteries were as good as dead. Luckily I had a UV torch on me because I hadn't yet unpacked my pockets from night geocaching the previous weekend. Came out of the room, telling the employees, 'Your UV badly needs new batteries.' - 'How did you solve it then?' - 'Well, had my own...'
bbgreenie
Hey Jeff...
"Went on a team building escape room and ended up in a room with a colleague we'll call 'Jeff.' Jeff is profoundly deaf and a large part of this particular room involved listening to messages on Dictaphones that could be found in different drawers* etc."
"About ten minutes into the timer an employee burst into the room in a panic and we turned to find Jeff taking the Dictaphone apart piece by piece because he had no idea it was making any sound. He was not supposed to do that, still a top bloke."
ifthen_endif
Letters matter...
lights alphabet GIFGiphy"I don't know if it's the weirdest but we had a puzzle which involved morse code. Usually you had to use an endoscope to find the alphabet in a chest. One person in this group actually knew the whole alphabet and was able to solve it."
MrNighty
She broke the machine...
"Not an employee, but while doing a casino-themed escape room with some colleagues, the worker told us 'please do not pull the lever on the slot machine as it will break something later in the game.' The timer started and my coworker went 'well we’re obviously supposed to do that first' and pulled the lever. We were not supposed to do that first. She broke the machine."
ProfessorBeer
Even though there are a million ways to escape, I'm still gonna pass. My claustrophobia won't allow it.
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Nobody wants to be lonely or left behind and charismatic whackos know that. Some people are just gifted at manipulation and they fashion their talents to control others for their diabolical doings. David Koresh. Charles Manson. Jim Jones. Donald Trump. They all created groups with followers who drank all the Kool-Aid. And there are more out there.
Stay Awake
tea GIFGiphyApparently the Sleepytime tea company is a cult? Or at least founded by one.
https://www.foodandwine.com/drinks/sleepytime-tea-and-little-known-religion-behind-it You weren't kidding.
The 12...
The 12 tribes. If you've been to a "yellow deli" restaurant you are supporting them unknowingly. They have it in their heads they need to raise 140,000 male virgins to be sacrificed on 2070 for the second coming of Jesus. You have to own enough property/money to join or they won't let you in as everything you own gets signed over to them right down to what clothes you get to own and where you live even if you own a home yourself.
They don't allow children to go to school and force them to work the farms that supply their restaurant, they also obviously have been charged dozens of times for gross child neglect/abuse and violating child labour laws. They are one of the more disgusting groups that doesn't get acknowledged. Also they exist all across Canada and the USA.
Doomsday
The House of Yahweh. It's literally a doomsday cult that has had 4-6 failed nuclear doomsday predictions. The founder believes he and his brother are prophesied messiahs but he went to jail for marrying off underage teens to older men in the group, oh and every female follower changes their last name to his last name I think, I think the founder also has multiple wives.
They have a compound and theres only one road that goes to it and on all the telephone poles along the road are cctv cameras
The members also have to pay tithes and the high ranking male members have like old testament names like Jebediah or Malachi, the founder changed his name to Yisrayl*.
Wes Anderson Indie GIF by Coolidge Corner TheatreFor real Gwyneth Paltrow is in a league of her own in being a champion of champagne pseudoscience. She recently came up with her list of "long COVID remedies" that include kimchi, kombucha, herbal non-alcoholic cocktails, detoxifying "superpowders," an infrared sauna blanket, and a $125 goop-branded T-shirt.
The ridiculous part is that her podcast has 36 million listeners so to argue that her influence is not that big a deal would be foolish to say. Of course if you have a functioning brain, you'll be fine.
I had no idea about any of these people. Why has Dateline NBC and Oprah not done specials with them? And now I have to change by tea preference. The insidiousness is everywhere. Let's continue on with more bad news.
JMMI
There's this christian cult a cousin of mine joined. JMMI (Joshua Media Ministries International). The leader is a self-acclaimed Apostle, David E. Taylor. I am legitimately afraid for my cousin. She packed up her life on the east coast and traveled to Missouri to be a part of their church. I think it flies under the radar because it pretends to be a christian church. The "apostle" is very creepy and has been accused by former members that he operates his "church" on slave labor.
To me, he appears to be another narcissist that preys on women. I'm afraid my cousin will be another victim of his. She actually told me she wants to marry him. She's so far in it that I don't know if she'll ever get out. He claims he predicted 9/11 and that he's curing COVID through prayer. He's one of those nut jobs where when I listen to him speak he sounds like he doesn't even realize he's lying through his teeth.
If you look up his depositions on YouTube (about misallocation of ministry funds) you'll see what I mean.
Sweat Group
Crossfit GIF by memecandyGiphyCrossfit feels cultish. I've tried a few times at a few different places and I kept getting a lot of bad advice, but people are still fanatics about it. Crazy high injury statistics to boot.
Religious Issues
I was a member of a cult (Gulenists in Turkey) and I fell for it. I was in top 100 in nation-wide exams where around 1 millions students participate so I think I got the brains. But brains is not enough. A brain dedicated to scientific thought and reason and taught in the ways of logical fallacies/dogmas etc and never accepts any claim without irrefutable proof is required. It was hard to find that in children in my country then. Today still many fall to religious cults, secular cults, nationalistic ideas etc.
Space People
The Raelien Society. They have some other name too, but basically they are trying to clone hot women to breed with the alien overlords, when they show up.
I would like to announce that I am an alien and that I have been in hiding for years and if you choose to make me your overlord then I'm willing to accept that burden. Where should I meet the chicks?
Church Pray GIFThe Long Con
Not a traditional cult, but very cult-like. Certain schools of chiropractic "medicine."
If you look into the history of chiropractic a little, it is pretty wild that some of the more traditional schools are allowed to operate in modern times.
The founder was a lifetime conman who claimed to have discovered the science of chiropractic by talking to ghosts. Traditional chiropractic philosophy believes that ALL sickness is due to "subluxations," aka misalignment in the spine.
There is also a huge crossover between traditional chiropractic theory and anti-vax messaging, because they believe ALL sickness can be remedied through spinal manipulation. In lieu of antibiotics they recommend adjusting (aka cracking) infants necks to treat ear infections.
I'm not saying that there aren't modern chiropractors who view their craft as a portion of more holistic treatment for muscular/skeletal issues, but an alarmingly large number of chiropractors believe and practice what I described above.
YL NO!
Essential oils, specifically Young Living. It's an MLM, and the story of the founder is absolutely frightening (he might've drowned his own baby). A lot of MLMs are cult-like in one way or another, but YL is absolutely the most cultish of them all and checks pretty much every box.
Where to Begin?
picture selfie GIF by American IdolGiphyQuiverfull, IBLP, basically the Duggars (of 19 kids & counting) & the like.
Follow the Leader
Any number of "economy of belief" cult-like groups like otherkin and soulbonders.
And Second Life has a subcommunity with strong economy-of-belief behaviour. It's where someone says "actually, I'm the reincarnation of Alexander the Great", and most people ignore them. But then someone comes along and says "hey, maybe you are, because I'm the reincarnation of Nikola Tesla" and they get along - they believe each other. And then someone else gets involved, and it slowly becomes more and more appealing to have this weird - but self-gratifying - belief affirmed by more and more people, just in exchange for doing the same for them.
And inevitably people then end up internalising and acting on the belief more and more since they can get it validated now, and it becomes more and more important to them until the mutual belief is locking them into the group; and then you end up with a social hierarchy inside it, gatekeeping and conflicts, and assorted mess.. there's usually not a single "leader" but it can become very like a cult, in particularly in terms of recruitment and aggressive response to outsiders not towing the line.
Bring Peace
Nonviolent Communication. Supposedly a program to learn how to communicate nonviolently, it's a new-agey philosophy on which you have to be trained by a certified professional (which costs money) or become a certified professional yourself (which costs money). It's all based on the teachings of one Marshall B. Rosenberg who IMO ticks all the cult leader boxes. I've read accounts of people whose close ones practice it and it devolves into mindless repetition of what emotions the other expresses and passing it off as empathy.
Praise
The Blues Brothers Church GIFGiphySome independent Evangelical churches. You'll know it's a cult when they turn a member away from their family.
In Alberta...
Oh man, this one is just strange, but not in an "we're all going to kill ourselves" or "live on a compound" way. The audience of weirdly devoted followers just have a weekly staring contest with this guy. $10/person to go.
It's The College of Integrated Philosophy in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It's been around since at least the 90s.
Basically the leader of the cult just has this staring contest with his attendees once a week for 3 hours and answers the odd question from the attendees. He's on a big screen while hundreds of people watch from the audience.
He's the "living embodiment of truth" supposedly. Things snap into place with the truth he spoke or something when he answers.. I dunno, but it's mostly just a staring contest.
The cult runs this super fancy conference hall (Oasis Centre) outside of the weekly meetings. It's really nice, my friends had their wedding there.
Edit:Vice article on it.
The Salesman
CUT Church of Universal and Triumphant. A vacuum salesman spread his ideas to customers in the California. His wife Elizabeth Clair Prophet eventually took over and moved the followers to just outside Yellowstone Park in the 80's. They had some beliefs about colors and swords and nuclear war. Their followers built fallout shelters and gave up everything at the end of the world. Each time the end didn't come, some of these people had nowhere to go, no money, and no jobs. CUT mostly fell apart when Prophet was diagnosed with dementia, but there are some splinters.
People got scared in the 80's. They didn't want a mass murder, poisonings, or suicides like other cults like the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh or the Manson Family. Someone took a shot at a bus of their kids. One of the local University student newspaper bankrupted itself because the editor spent their annual budget on surveillance equipment.
The area still has purple houses, one of their things.
Some still live in the bomb shelters. I have friends that grew up in it. One has a book written about her. Just by how they dress, you can tell some old ladies were in the cult, modeled their wardrobe around Profit and never changed. Some people you can just tell hearing them talk. It's as if a Rush Limbaugh listener took a lot of acid, conservative hippy kinda mix of ideas.
The guy that wrote Eragon grew up in the church. One of the members of the 80's band "Men at Work" was also a member.
Joe
Joe Rogan's most devoted fans. They aren't just fans, but people who turn "I heard it on the Rogan podcast" into their personality.
Rogan has on physicists and comedians and philosophers and soldiers, and...etc.
It seems like these guys think that repeating a smart person's words makes you smart, mimicking a comic makes you funny, you get the idea.
Before COVID, I'd see them at comedy shows wearing the Rogan Experience shirt and trying to start conversations with people so they could impress them with "their" deep thoughts and knowledge.
Crazy Music
headphones jamming GIF by SpongeBob SquarePantsGiphyWFMU has a radio show, Music of Mind Control, which features music from past and currently operating cults along with brief descriptions of the leaders/followers. Tuesdays 6-7pm EST, but the entire archive is available for streaming on their website.
Now go forward with eyes wide open. And if you're lonely, get a therapist and be very weary of strangers who want your money and hangout in groups. And if you feel something... say something. If it seems strange, it is.
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