Easy stuff…. Some of us are more sensitive than others…and this mostly revolves around open cube land… mostly…
When you step away from your desk to go to your lab or lunch or wherever you might go… please;
* Leave your pager (yes, the one you should wear on you since that is how people can get in touch with you) on your desk and let it have LOUD as signal
* Leave your cell phone with a LOUD ring signal and put it on the desk (not in a purse/desk/bag, although with certain loudnesses this might work too.)
* Never disable the “message repeat signal” so in case someone phones you and leaves a message, the phone can give a [by you preset] signal to remind you [if you were there this is] that “you have a message waiting”. Make sure that you put it on "remind me until I listen to the message, repeat every x mins"
If you are at your desk;
* Never lower your voice when you need to talk on the phone, especially not if you need to use a speaker phone (I mean, after all, it’s much more fun when you can listen to both sides of a conversation, right?) or if you are calling personal/private phone calls from work with some type of [private] comments (about friend/family/co-workers).
* Never reply to an email or a phone request when you were the one initiating the whole “we need to get this done yesterday”. Oh no, not you. Someone else can spend their whole day waiting for you to return something… and then, to further make it funny, please change your mind on what is priority number one and look surprised when this isn’t done. Because you didn’t do anything wrong… you had to run some personal stuff in the middle of the day…
* And as a kicker,(an old classic) if you take the last (second to, third to, anything less than 10 in an everyday item) vial/bottle/thing don’t bother letting anyone know that you did this since then [someone] could order more and actually not be out and having to run around like crazy looking for something vital to do experiments…. But if that meant that we could all go home and have the day off, sure…
Oh and one last thing…. If you can change an important file and save it in a magic place without telling people where you did this – then they might actually remake the file from scratch which will be funny once you tell them that “oh, but that information is already assembled in a file I saved over there in the magic cabinet without telling anyone”…
If you manage to do three out of these things, I know one person who would grow mildly irritated. If you did all of them in one day – yes, I know someone who’d go mental and be planning for an early leave since clearly she’d do more useful stuff at home than in the mad house with ring tones, bleeepings and loud noices.
(and no, head phones are not an option since where [some people] work over head calls are used to contact people when needed… since we don’t know where they are… light sedatives might be an option… maybe… ;) )
3 comments:
Hee hee! This made me laugh (sorry).
My area is nowhere as bad as cubicle land in my old job - lots of pagers and cell phones there - but there are lots of conversations going on around me, and some people just have no idea how loud their voices are! I once realised that even with my headphones on and music playing, I could hear 5 separate conversations going on...
Oh my. That sounds awful. I think you might need more than a mile sedative to keep your sanity.
Two people that work around me seem to have gone out of their way to find the absolute most irritating sounds for their ringtones. Of course they are as loud as possible.
Cath> laugh on ;) it's just my life sometimes.. right now it's quiet.
MXX> yeah, I've thought about it. I'm trying to focus on now listening to others. It's harder than you think. Somewhere I read that hearing the whole conversation might be less stressful than only one sided phoneconversations. Then again, the whole phone conversations I hear (with speaker phone in an open cube land) are extremely annoying ;)
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