Concur.
This little dispute should be handled in a professional and logical way.
If the department will pay for the t-shirts, I’ll gladly fetch the buckets of cold water.
Or if you are on nix, etc the /etc/shadow file to put a "" in the password field and , “mv /home/coworker /dev/null”. This will assure that she doesn’t just get put in some holding directory. userdel just isn’t sufficient.
Stranger
A former co-worker showed up here today, hovered over me as I was doing a complex task requiring concentration, while simultaneously chewing on some mini-carrots I had at my desk.
I see part of the solution right here.
The headphones are a good idea. There are also cordless ones that transmit music quite well and allow you freedom of motion.
OMG is her name Linda? Do you work in my office?
I am dead serious. We have that EXACT same person with that almost exact same set up.
She drives people crazy as not only is she loud but she has to have every word in her brain come out. She must tell the entire story or situation in full detail. She can not skim a subject and even if you agree with her or make it known that you understand she will not shut up. She continues to talk until she has had her say.
Her famous “not” last words are "the thing of it is is… blah blah blah.
Makes me want to choke her. She sits right next to me in the cube farm. I feel your pain.
There’s someone that hangs around my office bla bla blaing all day. And then she says that she has a lot to do so she is leaving. She’ll say that again and again for another hour.
1.) If you can get away with headphones and are the kind of person who can work with music playing, do that.
2.) If not, go to your boss (fortunately it sounds like it’s not the same person as the also-shouty boss) and say that you’re having problems because you can’t focus and get your work done because of other people shouting across desks/cubes/offices/whatever instead of calling, emailing, using some kind of instant messanger, or just getting off their asses to walk the five feet to talk to the person (obviously, this would probably be best phrased more diplomatically).
I loathe and detest this phrase. Whenever I hear it I cringe.
My annoying co-worker is actually a very nice lady who I enjoy working with. But she likes a radio at her desk and it’s tuned to soft rock “classic hits of yesterday and today” which makes me want to chop my ears off. I’m not the sort of person who can work with music on so that makes it doubly annoying.
Right now the Eurythmics are singing Sweet Dreams. I was bored with that song in the 80s.
But, back to your problem:
I think the direct approach is best. Tell her, in as nice a way as you can, that she needs to keep her voice down. With any luck she’ll get mad and stop talking to you. That won’t completely solve your problem but it might help.
Or have the office manager send an email to everyone reiterating the rules of cubicle ettiquette…cell phones on vibrate, radios low, reasonable phone voice and no leaning over someone’s shoulder while they’re working.
Heh. The one time I shut my office door because I had something due for my boss, I could hear the whispering and got weird looks like how dare I shut them out. Not to mention we don’t have air conditioning (part of the reason I need to get control of this before it gets crazy-hot again) so I can’t afford to block out any cross-breezes.
You guys are right that low-level music does help, but she often has hers playing even louder and she sings along. :eek::mad:
I’m proud of myself to some extent because I had a co-worker that hated me (like Scarlett) and I really took it to heart and let myself feel worse about myself for it. At least in this case I know it’s not me, it’s her.
Those foam ear plugs really do cut out extraneous sound and could help you ignore her. I put them in to read if my husband’s watching tv in the same room. They’re good because you can still hear someone speaking directly to you, and emergency sounds - exclamations, sirens etc.
I think I will try them. Somehow I think they make me feel claustrophobic but I’ll try anything at this point!
And they may soak up the sweat dripping off my head. I am not looking forward to this summer.
Just a thought, but what about a large-ish fan in your office?
- cools you down.
- white noise drowns out Loud Wench.
The thing about memos like that is that the people who need to read them the most tend to read them the least. Everyone BUT loud lady will quiet down.
We had someone start in this office a few years ago, and suddenly there friendly reminders going out every few days about our no scent policy. Stinky McStinkerson must have figured that the rules didn’t apply to her, because her choking stench just got worse. I think she must have finally been pulled aside and told to stop.
Good call. I have a box window fan ready to go and another one–a whole system of fans could make it like a turbine in here and … ooo, maybe it could suck her in and spit her out the other end, but in little non-reassemblable pieces. She is a lot smaller than I. Hmmm…
::evil cackle
This thread is making me remember I’m not alone, and she’s not the first or last stupidfuckingbitch I’ll have to deal with.
I had an annoying coworker of a different sort. She thinks she’s *so *clever and laughs uproariously and her own bon mots. :rolleyes: She can’t make a simple statement - she has to embellish every single thing. We hates her we hates her we hates her. I dealt with it by saying “shut the fuck up” under my breath every time I heard her voice. I like to think it kept me from hurting her.
Thankfully, I cross-trained and she and I don’t do the same work any longer. Plus I got moved to a different floor and to a different team. The only thing we have in common is our branch head, and she’s missed the last 2 branch meetings, so my life is much better.
“Radios on low?” People use radios in their cubes where other people can hear them? Why is this allowed?
Blanket statements or reminders are *never *a good way to deal with a problem. Any issues should *always *be addressed directly with the person in question. This is a major rule of good management that is almost never followed, because a lot of managers are shit at actually managing people.
ThisthisOHMYGODTHIS.
Blanket policies, emailed out, as “reminders,” just piss off the rest of us who are working AND trying really hard not to piss off our co-workers by engaging in flagrantly self-obsessed and narcissistic behavior.
I guess I should think of my own outcry that way, but I feel like it’s poisoning me.
When I have a radio or internet radio on, it’s at the lowest setting that’s still audible to me; I did do this when I was in a cube too, but honestly it was barely there.
But here, it’s dueling audio. The bitchfromhell will have pandora, the next cube will have pandora, hopefully the same channel but not always, and their boss will sometimes have talk radio! I’m someone who can’t read if I hear other discernable words; the faint noise of talking is no problem, but this is loud enough to hear words, and not only that but it’s conservative talk radio! Thankfully that’s fewer and farther between, like on lunchtime which we all spend at our desks.
But yeah, the radio and singalong is not unusual.
I’m getting agita just thinking about it!
I think I’ll bring cookies to all my cube mates just to say “thanks for not sucking.”