oh well, I guess I'll let you go now...

What a rediculously common way of telling people that you, yourself, are bored with the conversation and want to end it now.

It occurs quite often when talking on the telephone. When silence sets in and both parties don't really know what else to say, one of them usually goes - "oh well..."
That says it all, in my book. Already then you know that this person is not ready to continue with the conversation much longer.

If you were rude or insensitive enough to ignore it, though, and continued talking, or if you were even so wicked as to finish their sentence for them, you might just have provoked a discussion of colossal proportions. And since you might potentially end up critisizing social behaviors and interaction methods you run the risk of hurting the person you are talking to.

Today I was contacted by an old, distant acquaintance from greece that I have not exchanged so much as an email with for at least 2 years. If such a person suddenly chats you up you can go down one of two possible roads: either you are warm, welcoming and eager to catch up with the other with the utmost of attention to detail Or you are cold and cool and distant, since there might not be too much connecting the two of you in the first place.

Since I am not one for social conformities I ended up being the coldest, most distant I could be, considering the circumstances. And it wasn't like he didn't follow along - he played the careless, unemotional greek to perfection. When all our superficial conversation material was used up and we found ourselves looking at a still skype window he said the magic words - "oh well". I got very emotional all of a sudden and translated his following lines, which read "I think I bored you enough for one day", into "This bores me, I think I'll say good-bye now". I then told him about how I understood what he said, which set the ball rolling.

I actually don't think that my claim was that far fetched - I mean, honestly. Who hasn't been in this situation? Maybe when you experienced it, you knew exactly what the person really meant, just like I did, but you went with it anyway? (Either to evade conflict or because you yourself are bored).

Either way, he got pretty upset and we started discussing the conversation we had up to that point. We even went as far as to point out that we really don't know each other and that we acted cold because of that.
It was all very stressful and confusing. And all of that, just to close the skype window after a weird, overanalysed good-bye, while shaking my head in confusion about what just happened.