RE: Quiet workplace

[Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- rainbow -dot- com>]

 cupton -at- syclone -dot- net [mailto:cupton -at- syclone -dot- net]
> I originally brought in my aviator's ear plugs because of the 
> fire alarm,
> and they turned out to be handy to screen out my neighbor's 
> personal phone
> calls which were even more obnoxious.

At a previous company, I got thoroughly tired of hearing 
a cube-neighbor's soap-opera. So I finally began transcribing 
it, and printing it out, leaving several line-spaces between 
each utterance, for others to fill in their guesses as to what 
was being said on the other end of the line.  Then I posted 
the "blank" forms. Many of the responses were hilarious, and 
it was apparent that I was not the only person annoyed by 
the soap-opera broadcast.

After about a week, the neighbor became much more discreet.

My boss caught on that I was the /s/o/u/r/c/e/ conduit of 
the new office entertainment and inquired privately where 
I could be finding the time, given my workload. I told her 
that my workload went on hold every time the neighbor made 
the choices to place/accept a private phone call on company 
time (not a crime) and to make the office end of that 
conversation loud and public (a crime to me, at least).
I pointed out that if it was loud enough that I could 
record it over the noise of my own typing, then it was 
definitely loud enough to be displacing work thoughts 
from my skull.  The boss got the point.

I never did discover if the improvement came because of 
embarrassment of the cow-orker, or because the boss said 
something.

The person in question would have absolutely become one 
of those "I'm more important than you" types who used to 
carry on loud conversations with cellphones in restaurants.

Oh, and yes I did ask the offender to tone it down. 

/kevin