"How Busy Are You?"

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Whenever someone asks me "How busy are you?", I immediately start trying to quantify my response. It used to take me several seconds before I could respond - which created a very awkward silence. Then, for a while, I would answer with a random number, like "7," but I think the humor was lost on the person asking the question.

I've learned to stop myself as soon as I notice it happening & simply respond "what do you need?" or "how can I help you?" - but I got called on it this morning by a coworker (in a friendly way).

Anyway, does anyone else immediately start calculating when someone asks them this?

I did not get asked this particular question a lot (I worked on a team where everyone knew how busy everyone else was), but when folks asked me open-ended questions like "what do you think will happen when [insert situation here]?", I would usually answer "70% chance of success, 30% chance of failure" or something like that. It went over ok in that setting (I worked with lots of aspies and near-aspies), but I also tend to respond that way in non-work life as well. The great challenge is for me to recognize which questions need an accurate response and which ones are fishing expeditions or conversation starters. Amazing that I have reached this advanced age and figuring this out is still a big deal for me...

I've always hated that question. Even *if* I was rude enough to tell someone I'm too busy to care about their problem, I'd need to know what it was before I could make that determination.

The other one I get all the time is "How familiar are you with x?" (where "x" usually turns out to be something only tangentially related to what the person is really asking). I've found that something along the lines of "Try me." is the only useful answer.

i do it a lot......but i dont get caught like you describe.


i noticed it at uni....lecturer would walk in a say " nice day"

and i would wonder if that woul d be on the exam.

even now when people say to me..."nice day"

i know intellectually ( not instinctivly) that it is a generic greeting and an opening line for chit chat.
i used to and still do wonder what their criteria is for niceness in a day. like you say i need the statement to be qualified or quantified.

now i just respond as expected and make polite chit chat.

when someone says...how busy are you....it is an opening to attempt to dump work on you.

i used to always take it and never was assertive enough to say no.

but i usually respond with somethign better but i still kill myself with honestly answering by sometimes saying " i aint that busy"

then they take this as a cue to dump work onto you.

it used to annoy me but not so much now.

"How busy are you?" was a popular game at my college. The object was to have more work than anyone else. So my inclination is to answer the question by listing everything I'm supposed to be doing. But that's probably not the kind of answer most people are looking for.

I used to give specific, true answers to the greeting "How are you?" I already knew that this was a formulaic sentence, but I resisted the notion of answering a prefabricated question with a prefabricated answer. I wanted to give my answer. But the world won.

When I get asked this question at work, I answer in one of two ways: "Not very. Why?" or "Pretty busy. Why?" Either way, the result will be the same, because I only get asked by people I'm being paid to help or whom it is in my own best interest to help.

omg I do even though I am not mathematically minded much.

I think what runs through my head is how to describe how busy I am in words! Which I can't get out in time either.