I do have an office. With walls. It also has doors.
I spend a large chunk of my day on the phone. I generally shut my doors.
The problem? A coworker. An eavesdropping coworker. I’ve complained about her before but there has been no resolution.
Today, I was chatting with my boss in my office about a funny catalog we had received. The coworker opened my door to comment on the catalog. She came right into my office, my office with walls, to make a comment on what we were talking about.
I would check to see if she is out there, lurking. And then I would pretend to make a call–if you can ad lib while listening to a dial tone, say something like, …and the check is in the mail. Oh, and here is Ms. Snoopy Nose (use her real name) coming in to see if she gets a check, too, but she doesn’t because she’s too much in my business."
Kinda obnoxious, but she is obviously a person who does NOT recognize boundaries. She needs a slap in the face with a wet fish, but that is not feasible.
Or, do the phone call thingy, but say something along the lines of “Whaa? Whoa! I can’t believe you just burst in like that! Is there an emergency? I’m on the phone to Tokyo-”
(I think that people who have offices with doors etc are always doing summthin glamorous and important behind them. I work in an open nurse’s station–everyone owns me for 12 hours at a clip…
Continue making complaints which apparently go nowhere.
Talk to co-worker yourself, and tell her firmly and politely that you don’t appreciate her listening to private conversations. If she can hear them, and there’s no way around that, courtesy demands that she pretend that she can’t.
Set her up really well, a couple times a day. Say things on pretend phone calls that you know will turn her ears red and put her in a position where if she acknowledges that she can hear you, some negative consequence will happen to her.
Just ignore her. Completely. If she busts into your office so inappropriately like she did with this private conversation, just keep on talking with the person in your office like she wasn’t even there. Bonus points if they go along with it, too.
The beauty of having a door is that you can lock it. If your nosey-body is such a pest, just lock the door when you close it. Even if it’s just a privacy lock like on bathroom doors. An alternative is to speak up really loudly the next time she barges into your office: EXCUSE ME … THIS IS A PRIVATE CONVERSATION!!!
And I would have done the ignore thing, but I didn’t get the chance.
She just opened the door, walked in, and started talking to my boss about something in the catalog. They then stood in my office, my office with walls for the next five minutes while I turned back to my computer in sullen silence and wrote the OP.
Go to a 99 cent store and get either a cheap little chain lock for the door, or if you don’t want to put holes in anything, a doorstop. Close the door and lock or wedge it.
Personally, I’d recommend the little chain lock. If she tries to open the door and it doesn’t move, she might think it’s stuck. If the door opens two inches then the chain grabs, it’s hard not to get the idea that she’s being locked out.
