Me: Todd, did you see Nina again this weekend?
Todd: Yeah, she stayed over Friday.
Inattentive Steve: What?
Me: Oh, Todd got with Nina again.
Inattentive Steve: Oh.
Todd: I really need to stop. I think she wants something more serious.
Me: Yeah, maybe, man.
Inattentive Steve: What?
Me: He said Nina wants something serious.
Todd: I don’t know though, I’d rather go for Michelle.
Me: That sucks.
Inattentive Steve: What?

I hate Inattentive Steve. Inattentive Steve brings the pace of any conversation to a grinding, repetitive halt.

This person has some consistent, defining characteristics to his behavior we should note. First, he is occupying himself with something that really isn’t that significant but enough to pull him away from the conversation, just enough to not hear a single thing that is said. Second, he’s nosy enough to care about whatever _is_ being said but not enough to pay actual attention. The perfect storm.

Inattentive Steve acts on this foolishness by coercing you to repeat every single thing you say in conversation in real time. This is just awful, as you might imagine, for there really is nothing quite like the experience of having the length of your conversation doubled. It’ll pretty quickly transform your discussion into an aggravating Sisyphean hell.

As you might also imagine, the degree of disaster wreaked by Inattentive Steve heightens in proportion to how serious the conversation at hand currently is.

Mike: Robert, Michelle had a miscarriage. The baby’s dead.
Steve: What?
Mike: My baby died, Steve.

Mike: Someone help me lift this woman up from the ledge — I can’t hold her any longer!
Steve: What?

The consequences of hanging out with Steve can be dire.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here, though. The common age for Inattentive Steve is usually around the 8 to 12 years old. The majority of my friends are not in this range anymore. This limits my conclusion to two things. One, kids are terrible people, and I don’t ever want to have them. Two, my own peers who act in similar fashions are not only immature but also terrible people, which makes for two bad things instead of one.

Maybe we should head to the root of the problem. Perhaps Steve had a deeply traumatic experience as a child that causes his attention to flake, or perhaps it’s the dual effect of Attention Deficit Disorder and partial deafness at the same time. Or maybe that Pokémon Red version he found at GameStop is just really freaking interesting today and deserves his complete and undivided attention.

There are so few steps that can be taken against Inattentive Steve. If you tell him politely to shut up or hit him, you come off as somehow condescending or violent. If you ignore him completely, you come off as utterly insensitive to the poor guy’s feelings. Steve is untouchable, and I often suspect he knows it, that smug bastard. He just cannot be silenced.

Lately, at the first sign that Inattentive Steve is in the room, I’ve taken to simply repeating every sentence that comes out of my mouth without pause, in the hopes of relieving him of that precious second it takes for him to prove his total inability to participate in a conversation. It’s semi-effectual, under the assumption that you don’t mind sacrificing your sanity in the eyes of anyone else involved in the discussion.

Beyond that, I consider Steve a hopeless case, and I endorse the basic strategy of avoiding him at all costs. If evasion tactics are just not feasible, simply don’t speak, for silence is golden, and it cannot be repeated.