I had a manager once who would say "mmm-hmm" all the time. It was really distracting and actually made it seem like he wasn't listening at all, even if he was actually hanging on my every word.
Some Japanese carry their listening habits over to English when they learn it as a second language. This involves a lot of these noises and small words like 'amazing', 'wow' etc even if the topic is mundane. I've been told they consider that polite, but in English it's quite irritating.
Huh, that's kind of interesting, although in this case the person in question was about as white as you can be.
I have a manager now who spews out information like a water main and instead of natural pauses, they make weird sounds like 'uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and another thing'. They are also extremely hard to interrupt so if there's something they said that needs clarification, it's a pain in the ass to get clarification because they're still speaking at my second attempt to ask a question before diving deeper into the rabbit hole. Ah new managers.
Is spewing out information like a water main a heavy, dense stream of information or a just a stream of verbiage (could cut out 90%)?