How Are You? (As If I Care!)

I'm fed up with this sodding rain!
It's not the achingly deep gloom which descends alongside the raindrops. It's not the chance of fun in the great outdoors it washes away. It's not even the monotony......... It's the fucking small talk!
"Phew! I've never known anything like it." (FASCINATING! TELL ME MORE THINGS YOU DON'T KNOW)
"Is it ever going to stop raining?" (YES. NOW FUCK OFF)
"This weather! What's happening?" (IT'S FUCKING RAINING, DUMBASS!)
God, I hate small talk! I face it the moment I shamble into work every morning. Having sworn a holy vow of non-ambulatory-exertion, I take the lift up to my offices and lifts are at the centre of the small talk universe. Before the latch on the Heavens broke, I was regularly greeted with pearlers such as "Another day, another dollar, eh?", "The morning soon comes around, doesn't it?" and "Roll on Friday".
The trouble with that kind of small talk is that it's almost all, in practice, rhetorical. I mean, if you really are earning a dollar a day then you need to have a serious word with your union. As to how long mornings take to follow evenings, that only ever gets shorter when you approach the speed of light. Roll on Friday? Yeah, and butter on Tuesday and soup on Wednesday. What's your point?
Other small talk classics are the ones which involve supposedly enquiring after the other person's welfare. "How are you?", prompting the inevitable "Oh, fine, thanks". "Good weekend?" leading to the predictable "Not bad, cheers". Can't we just exchange cards instead of going through this bollocks?
I have taken to turning small talk into real talk. That soon stops things. "How are you?" "Do you really fucking care?" or "Well, actually, I've got this rash which is itching like buggery and, talking of which, I'm in debt up to my testicles and my marriage is almost at an end and my back hurts and I'm knackered and the car is playing up and........."
"Good weekend?" "Yes, brilliant, thanks. I got drunk on Saturday night and went out on a killing spree. I managed to slaughter 27 prostitutes and a cake shop assistant but enough about me. How about you?"
"Can you believe this rain?" "Now that is a very interesting point. I mean, is it really here? How can you actually prove it's existence? I'm sure Jean Paul Sartre would take issue with me but this could all be just a dream. Belief in itself is a fascinating subject. I mean, imagine for one moment you're a grasshopper on a speeding comet and..............."
It's so much more imaginative and mind exercising than just rolling your head round to greet the chirpy person next to you, stubbing your fag out on their lapel and saying "Why don't you just fuck off and die?"
No, sorry, small talk can go to Grantham.