When someone wants you to randomly "tell a story"

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Although I can be creative at times, there are times when I am having a conversation with another person, and the other person after a pause says something like "Oshibka, tell me a story." A person who asks this is usually someone I don't know well and someone who wants to know more about me, possibly even flirting with me. The problem is, if someone wants me to tell them a story, I don't know how to respond - I can't just think up an interesting story in a few seconds, and I don't have an archive of stories in my head specially made for the situation. So I usually respond with something like "I can't think of anything", or I do tell some kind of story that is uninteresting to anyone but myself.

Have you guys ever encountered situations like this? What do you do?

I don't think that's ever happened to me, but if it did I'd have some fun with it.
I'd say give me a name of an animal, a person, a location/town/country and pick a subject. I would then proceed to come up with the most ridiculous story ever.

The weird thing is that I usually don't assume that it should be a fictitious story. I'm actually not bad at making up ridiculous stories that some people even believe, but if I have to recall a true story about something that actually happened in my life, it's hard to find anything that would be interesting to someone other than me.

i don't get asked to tell people stories but i do regularly get asked for information. i think people i know have come to realize that i'm a storehouse of information. as a result i get a lot of random questions: "what do you know about international shipping," "how many moons does Jupiter have," "which culture of Japan made its appearance first, chronologically speaking?"

often i have the answers, but it does make me feel like people think i'm some kind of human wikipedia.

At one of the offices I clean, the president found a bug he couldn't identify. He asked his office manager-"Go ask Aimless, she knows a little bit about everything." I don't of course but I thought that was funny.

I might be tempted to make up a parable....."once upon a time there was an Aspie, and one day this guy who didn't really understand AS came up and asked them to tell them a story. The Aspie graciously refrained from whacking them over the head for their rank stupidity, and instead explained patiently to them that Aspies find that kind of thing very difficult. The guy initially had a bit of trouble with this, but he gave it some thought and realised that the Aspie was right. He apologised and began to make a proper effort to really understand the Aspie. Eventually the two of them became good friends, and they lived happily ever after."

I've never been asked to tell a story, except by children who always seemed satisfied with stuff out of story books. I once had a girlfriend who would say "talk to me!" and that didn't work at all because when I was put on the spot like that, my mind would just go blank. I think if it were to happen now, I'd just come out with a random, meaningless string of words, and I'd emphasise some of the words in an exagerrated way as if there was great meaning behind what I was saying. Or I'd just recite by heart one of the short stories from "Rhinocratic Oaths" by the Bonzo Dog Band:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3qe4hsT9Ik

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I never was good at talking about random stuff. I would probably do like you and say I could not think of anything. I would probably stutter alot and try to explain my way out of it and end up being really awkward and the person would just avoid me aftarward. On the plus side most people already do avoid me, so that type of thing doesn't come up much.
Does this happen to you often?

I like to have fun with it, and see what I can do, creatively.

I would attempt to retell either a ballad, book or film.

Yeah, this is the exact same thing I'm talking about. If I have to "say something" or "do something" just because someone asked me to, nothing comes up at all. I think in the future I just need to have something prepared for such occasions.

If I had a dollar for every time someone came in to my office and started a conversation with, "you know a lot of trivia! What is..."

If I had a dollar for all the times I could answer the question I'd be well-off!

I hope my last employer never checked my Internet usage because I may have spent whole days obsessively researching random topics.

I've never been asked to tell someone a story but people have on occassion asked me to tell them about my life (mostly when talking to people online) and I really don't know what to say. That question is so vague & I don't know what part of my life they want to hear about.

Usually I would ask them to specify what parts of my life they'd like to know about but sometimes they're like..."I don't know, just give a summary about what you've done over the past few years" or something similar. ARGH it's hard.

I'd rather be asked to tell a story because then I could at least say the one of Goldilocks and the Three Bears...some might find that funny.

Some of these posts sound familiar.

There've been times when I've been asked, "So what do you know?"



My brain usually freezes up, like trying to run too many queries at once. Not good.

Here's another anectode...

I once had a friend who lived in another state. One day she contacted me and said she was going to be in my town on business. I suggested we meet up and have lunch (somewhat out of character for me, but at the time she was my oldest friend [in terms of years known, not age], and I thought it was the appropriate response).

Her response: "OK, but you have to talk."

This is why school is better than real life.
Or, better yet, mathematics.

In mathematics, you will never be asked "Give me an estimate of how much [a number between 10 and 50] cost."
Or "How much is a number between 40 and 100 and a number between 23 and 39?

Oh, the vagueness of it all is mind-locking.
The worst question I have ever encountered in my life is "How are you?"
A much better question to ask is "What emotion(s) are you currently feeling?"
But people are stupid and think that is too formal.
I would rather have formal than some kind of code I have to decipher before I can answer.
And then I seize up, try to formulate an answer and they get pissed (angry, not drunk).
Or, "how have you been?" I have never been asked this (because the friends I used to have were never vague like this, we just played games together) but it seems a horrible question.
It seems like a kind of check one might see in computers.
One computer wants to check if another computer is infected or not (and try to infect it to launch massive attacks against servers) and if the computer does not answer correctly or takes too long it is infected.
Or maybe the first computer is trying to establish a connection.
Yes that makes more sense in this analogy.
But then again, the computer that sees that one computer is infected is not likely to discard it from its social group and spread a rumour about it, questioning its sexuality.
It might, however, discard it from its network and alert other computers to its status.

Computers are very like humans, now I think of it.
But computers are better because they are without emotions.
If people could put arithmetic in the unconcious mind, we would no longer need computers.
I would gladly sacrifice all my social skills for arithmetic skills.
The unconcious mind makes 200.000 calculations in a second.
That is incredibly fast.
I would say "try to wrap your head around that number" but you already have!
If only my mind was a computer.

Last edited by ursaminor on 12 Mar 2010, 12:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I normally only managed to say "now that you've put me on the spot, my mind's gone blank!".