Mr. Over-Explainer

I've had the immense pleasure of working with a guy for the last 4 months who is an over-explainer. He is the kind of guy, who instead of asking for a tennis ball asks for a round, slightly hard but bouncy object manufactured from a rubber compound, covered in a felt surface in a bright yellow hue and with an approximate diameter of 2.5 inches.

Ok, so he has never asked me for a tennis ball (I missed our company tennis day - thank god) but you get the idea.

It is driving me CRAZY.

He also has a tendency to use words that leave you with the feeling that his mouth has a built in thesaurus. I actually have to ask him to translate what he is talking about sometimes so that I can understand what it is that he wants. Often he will walk into the room and ask a general question of us (there are three of us who sit in the same office) and as a response will receive only blank stares.

Will he ever come to the realisation that he is over-explaining things and that no-one is really sure what he's talking about 90% of the time? I have honestly never in my life come across someone who can make the simplest things seem so complicated, and I've had to deal with some pretty airy-fairy landscape architects in my line of work.

I've been thinking of ways to try to let him know that he is over-explaining, since the traditional "I can't understand what you're talking about because you over-explain" method has so far failed. I think the key to this may lie in talking to him in his own language.

I'm thinking of saying something like this:
"Mr Over-Explainer, It has been drawn to my attention that when conversing with my colleagues and I on matters that relate to the design and layout of playground equipment that your enquiries and propositions are often fraught with terminology and descriptors that are both obsolete and preposterously convoluted. When speaking with us, could you please try to minimise the amount of verbal refuse and cut to the chase."
I.e. – cut the crap and tell me what it is that you want.

I'm not sure if this will work, because so far I have put his total disregard of anything that I tell him down to the fact that we have a language barrier of sorts and things have been lost in translation. I haven't really considered that he may just not care that no one understands what he says.

If that's the case then I may be in for many more months of Over-Explanation.

Yay.