Mine is "What's the question?"

I basically have to ask that almost every other time someone starts a conversation.

They talked for 3 minutes and never actually articulated a problem or request but just sort of recounted some seemingly random but presumably related facts.

Yep, that's a good one.

If my experience with beginning programmers generalizes to "the real world" (and I strongly suspect that it does, because the mindset non-programmers bring when they start programming has to come from somewhere) then I can also propose: "What needs to happen? What has been tried so far? What happened when that was tried, and how is that different?"