What's the deal with retired people?

Tonight I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription while on my way someplace else. It should have been quick. It wasn't.

When I got near the counter, there were six people ahead of me. All were visibly annoyed. I saw why: an elderly man was taking a very long time.

The guy was mostly deaf, which meant that he was answering questions that no one had asked him, and he was answering them at length. They were also questions that no pharmacist would ever be asking a customer. The pharmacist was yelling, trying to be polite, while the retired guy just sat there grinning and babbling. His prescription was on the counter. We all were waiting for him to pay for it, a captive audience. He was told that he needed to pay $27.94, but he had other ideas and other unasked questions to answer.

So we all found out that his sister had been there earlier in the day, and had picked up three prescriptions. We also learned that she had been feeling poorly for about a week, maybe six days, but the guy couldn't be sure. And we stood there as this grinning fool tried to figure out exactly how many days his sister had been sick, by way of reciting virtually everything that had happened to him in the past six days.

"That'll be $27.94," the pharmacist once again stated, pointing at the figure on the receipt.
The idiot instead held forth on his theories of the cause of his sister's ailment.

None of this had any bearing on the elderly guy's prescription whatsoever. We were all waiting for this man to pay his $27.94 and let us conclude our 90-second transactions. Some scowled, some rolled their eyes, others audibly sighed.

"$27.94", the pharmacist said for the third time.

The grinning fool just blinked. "I've got Blue Cross", he said.
The pharmacist explained that there was a co-pay of $27.94 that was his responsibility.

The elderly man shook his head, turned to the rest of us, and announced apropos of nothing, "I worked at Wal-Mart for fifteen years".
Unsurprisingly, nobody was intrigued by this revelation.
In some mysterious way, elderly people perceive a lack of interest as an invitation for greater exposition. We all got to hear about every damn job this fool ever did at Wal-Mart, and the jobs he wasn't considered for. We were subjected to his story of how he got his nephew a job there - a good kid, in case anyone was wondering. Wasn't much good at cutting keys, though.

I'm not at all sure how someone gets the idea that a pharmacist needs to know your detailed employment history before you can pay for a prescription, much less how they imagine that people waiting in line would need to know these things. Or how your nephew stacked up against other employees.

"$27.94", the pharmacist said for a fourth time, waving his hand to distract the babbler's attention from the contents of a woman's cart, lest it become the next topic of his rambling and pointless speech.

"The doctor said this would fix me right up," he said, pointing to one of the bags of his yet-unpaid-for prescription.

"I'm sure it will", the pharmacist said.

"That's what he said!", as if someone was arguing with his statement. "Fix me right up!".
We then were privileged to hear his detailed description of his primary care physician, and his evaluation of the physician's skills. The babbling fool then announced that he had walked to the pharmacy, and he detailed his exercise regimen. And more babble about irrelevant stuff, including the condition of sidewalks.

Three minutes after this last grinning expose into details of his life that nobody cared about, he paid his $27.94 and shuffled away. He had wasted ten minutes of seven peoples' time with inane babble, and he behaved as if he was doing us all a great service.

I have a retired neighbour who buttonholes me as I'm leaving for work frequently. Even though I say that I'm ten minutes late for work, he'll just nod and launch into another tedious story of someone that I don't know and the minute trials and victories of their life. He's retired; time means nothing to him. Today, a friend of a friend of his bought a lawnmower. This is apparently supposed to be deeply important to me, though I don't have a lawn.

"Gotta go," I said, moving toward my car.
"Suuure. You should see this lawnmower!," he said, as if I had just asked for more details on the amazing lawnmower - which he then divulged at length.

Now, I am not some kind of anti-social jerk. If I have time, I'll willingly sit and pretend to be mesmerised by the mundane details of almost anyone's life. I'm an excellent listener.
But courtesy does not allow someone to demand your time whenever they please, and it kind of compels the person engaging you to at least make some kind of feeble pretence that the topic is in some way of interest to you.

I understand that a lot of retired people don't have anyone to talk to, and that is both sad and pathetic. Some will wring their hands and bemoan the loss of simpler times when people would sit around and babble about anything that crossed their mind. Maybe in those simpler times your boss didn't care if you were fifteen minutes late for work because you just had to sit and listen to someone tell you about an amazing lawnmower. I doubt it, though.

Where in the social contract does it say that someone can demand ten minutes from seven total strangers (eight, if you include the pharmacist) with absolutely no consideration of their schedules? Who are these people to decide that your time is less valuable, or that your lives will be enriched by hearing about their sister's illness, their work history, and their opinion of their physician? What mysterious clause in the social contract releases the babbler from any relevance or brevity in conversation?

Note to you retired people: You are not making the world a kinder, gentler place. You are selfishly imposing yourself on others. You are undermining the rules of conversation by completely ignoring the other person with inane babble that absolutely no one else could find interesting. You are making people less willing to talk to you, because you are inconsiderate.
Yeah, it sucks that you're lonely. It's sad that these tedious recitations of disconnected facts are what compose your life. I get it. But really, nobody cares about any of the inane blather you are "sharing". And you don't care that other people have places to go and things to do, either. So drop the pretence that you are upholding some kind of societal benefit or lost rules of etiquette.
I certainly didn't set aside an extra ten minutes to hear a stranger talk about his mundane life, and the people waiting for me didn't, either. How awful of us.

Also, here's a tip: get a goddamn hearing aid if you want to talk to people. The guy in the pharmacy had Blue Cross, as we all learned. He could get a hearing aid and have it paid for. Don't force people to yell. We don't find your hearing loss to be charming or endearing. If you aren't willing to listen to the people you are talking to, then you aren't meeting your obligation in a conversation. But you aren't really interested in a conversation anyway, are you? You just want an audience and some attention. In simpler times, people like you were called "boors".