Rather familiar situation. But there is a polite way to solve the problem: when NT begins to talk about the essence of the question, show, that you are interested (e.g. with some short answers or small extra questions). If you cannot extract such piece in the conversation, reask the question in another form.
unreal3x wrote:
I have to dig through the mess of words and try pick out all of the job related parts and put it back together to form my current priority.
NT use such style of conversation for expressing their emotional states and support unformal relationships. When you are dealing with such thing, you may even not concentrate on exact meaning of sentences, facts, slang words... To avoid overloads and "multitasking", it is possible to read emotions from voice tone and not caring about details of face expressions and eye contact.