Distracting Coworkers



  • I have worked with a variety of people in my various jobs, but at every position there was always one or two that took the proverbial cake for their ability to be distracting/annoying. My own personal examples:

    1) The chain-smoking co-worker with the hacking cough (about every 5 minutes or so) that could wake the dead.

    2) The "rock star" that wore headphones but sang out loud and played the drum solos on their desk for all to hear.

    3) The amazingly annoying "laughing girl" who has you looking over the walls of your cube for the dying camel that has intruded into the office-space.

     Anyone have any interesting stories along these lines?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    No stories but some more peeves

    4) The person who has a voice that can be heard from the other side of the office. When 

        4a) the person she's talking to is less than 1.5m away or

        4b) the person she's talking to is on the other end of her mobile phone.

    5) The person who's expecting a support call on their mobile Soon[tm], then leaves it on their desk and dissappears for hour+ long meetings/lunch

    6) (Related to 5) Anyone who has an obnoxiously loud/annoying ringtone.

    7) People who 'borrow' stuff from my desk or my demo setup. Without asking/mentioning it. This has previously ranged from pens/rulers, to keyboards, computer parts, cables, dongles, power supplies, sim cards, monitors, tools.

        7b) As #7 but when I'm actually *in* the office, instead of on-site for the week or so.

    8) The twat who broke the kettle the other day, and didn't fucking tell anyone. "I'll just leave the switch precariously placed where it would be if it worked and let the next person discover it..."


  • Garbage Person

    Working on a college campus is the worst... Or best. Especially so if your office happens to open out onto the community (i.e. not engineering and not CS) computer lab. SO MUCH EYE CANDY. CAN'T KEEP HEAD IN MONITOR. ARGH.

    Some of the permanents there have actually set up a pan-and-zoom surveilance camera with HTTP control.



  • @Weng said:

    Some of the permanents there have actually set up a pan-and-zoom surveilance camera with HTTP control.

     

    Share the link or it didn't happen!



    • The guy in the next cube who spent most of every day on the phone schmoozing up to people in order to further his local politics career.
    • The colleague who has to have the same thing explained to him every other week
    • The sales guy in the the office (who has a wife and 2 kids) who has the mentality and behavior of an 18 year old frat boy wanna be.
    • The guy I report to who thinks that multitasking really works and can never get past line 2 of an email


  • @Weng said:

    Working on a college campus is the worst... Or best. Especially so if your office happens to open out onto the community (i.e. not engineering and not CS) computer lab. SO MUCH EYE CANDY. CAN'T KEEP HEAD IN MONITOR. ARGH.

    Some of the permanents there have actually set up a pan-and-zoom surveilance camera with HTTP control.


    I used to work in an office just above a private mail exchange for lawyers etc. Every morning the young office girls would walk under our (darkened - because the faced the sun) windows on the way to collect the days mail. It was great entertainment especially in summer!



  • @jpaull said:

    The "rock star" that wore headphones but sang out loud and played the drum solos on their desk for all to hear.
    Wtf, who does this?!

    Anyway for me it's the loud ringtones, especially when they leave their mobiles on their desk and then bugger off somewhere. It's a good thing I don't have a hammer handy.

    Then it's people having a chat with coworkers that sit close to me. This isn't a pub, fuck off. To be fair though they don't do it all that much. I think they've noticed the rage that I work so hard to conceal.



  • @jpaull said:

    I have worked with a variety of people in my various jobs, but at every position there was always one or two that took the proverbial cake for their ability to be distracting/annoying. My own personal examples:

    1) The chain-smoking co-worker with the hacking cough (about every 5 minutes or so) that could wake the dead.

    2) The "rock star" that wore headphones but sang out loud and played the drum solos on their desk for all to hear.

    3) The amazingly annoying "laughing girl" who has you looking over the walls of your cube for the dying camel that has intruded into the office-space.

     Anyone have any interesting stories along these lines?

    I like to refer to number 3 as "The Banshee"

    1) I'd also like to add the guys you have to deal with who doesn't work well with others.  I once had to explain sql injection to him and why I needed to modify a piece of code he had written years prior when he was fresh out of college.  He had noticed me working on it and got noticeably flustered. Demanading an explain as to why I modifying *HIS* code.  Nevermind that my boss at the time had tasked me with fixing it.  He made a huge deal out of nothing and kept telling me how this situation was making him angry over and over again... ya he didn't last long after that thankfully.  he's the guy who asks for input and then doesn't take any semblance of criticism well...

     2) The friggin person who has no sense of hygene or cleaning up after themselves.  I can't tell you the sheer number of times I've walked into the restroom to find the toilet caked in piss and shit with toilet paper stuck to the exterior sides, top, etc.  Piss on the floor and occasionally a turd as well. 

     3) The people who put popcorn in the microwave for 5 minutes and leave it to burn to ash!

    4) Anyone who cooks fish in the microwave.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @galgorah said:

    The friggin person who has no sense of hygene or cleaning up after themselves. [restroom]
    Not quite as bad as that one, but the kitchen, and the slobs who think it's someone else's job to do the 'menial' stuff.

    Happily, largely solved with the application of one those 'make your own motivational poster' sites and a laminating machine. Something along the lines of:


    <center>

    <font color="#339966" size="4">[Picture of a washing up </font>

    <font color="#339966" size="4">bowl filled with crap.]</font>

    <font size="6">Washing up</font>

    <font size="3">It's more than just dumping your dirty cups/plates etc in the sink and expecting them to wash themselves.</font>

     

    </center>


  • @galgorah said:

     2) The friggin person who has no sense of hygene or cleaning up after themselves.

     

    Oh, you mean co-workers from India...

     

    I don't say that to be a racist dick, but every single one that I have had to work with seems to think that taking a bath, and deoderant for that matter, are a luxory that they just can't afford.  I don't care if it's 'custom' in their country to not shower or whatever the reason is, but here: we really don't want to smell you.

    I have this one Indian guy on my team that I can actually smell him coming.  It's fucking disgusting.  

    I know I know, this doesn't only apply to IT guys from India, there are plenty of disgusting Americans as well.  It has been my experience though that the percentage of funtastic folks from India is far greater than that of any others.



  • @amischiefr said:

    It has been my experience though that the percentage of funtastic folks from India is far greater than that of any others.
    Meh, I've lived with indian programmers back in my uni days and there was nothing wrong with them. Oddly enough the one guy in my course that reeked was british. So you could say that it has been my experience the percentage of funtastic folks from the UK is far greater than that of any others. Which of course means nothing.

     If you want to talk about nasty smells then you'd have to look at the female sex first. You know, the ones that thing perfume bottles are single-use. Buy a bottle today, use it, get another one tomorrow. The ones that trail a toxic cloud behind them and leave you choking every time you cross their wake.

    Walk through the spray ladies, don't shower in it.



  • @galgorah said:

    Piss on the floor and occasionally a turd as well. 
     

    What.. the f... fuhhhck

    I...

    the fuck, yo. What sort of office was that?



  • @dhromed said:

    @galgorah said:

    Piss on the floor and occasionally a turd as well. 
     

    What.. the f... fuhhhck

    I...

    the fuck, yo. What sort of office was that?

    What?

     

    What?

     

    Like you've never laid chocolate in a public restroom.  It's funny.



  • @PJH said:

    5) The person who's expecting a support call on their mobile Soon[tm], then leaves it on their desk and dissappears for hour+ long meetings/lunch
    I'm more annoyed by people who bring their cell phones to meetings.  If you're just going to text with your girlfriend the whole meeting, why are you here?

    I'm fine with people leaving their phones on their desks so long as they don't have annoying ring tones.  I leave mine there because I don't want to be interrupted during whatever I'm doing.

    anyways,

    10) The guys who like to sit and spout their retarded political bullshit every day.  I don't care what your political views are.  If I cared, I'd ask you.  Then you send me every remotely humorous article you find on foxnews.com via email and two seconds after sending you ask me "Hey did you read that?"  NO, I have work to do.  If you want me to read something, send me something that is legitimately entertaining, like a compilation of bstorer's best posts over the years or a video of an iraqi baby drowning in a vat of vanilla ice cream.



  • @PJH said:

    Not quite as bad as that one, but the kitchen, and the slobs who think it's someone else's job to do the 'menial' stuff.
    I'm going to go both ways on this one.

    There is no disposal in our break room sink, so there's a sign up mentioning that fact and recommending we only rinse liquids down the drain.  

    Well where are we supposed to wash our dishes, hot shot?



  • @galgorah said:

    3) The people who put popcorn in the microwave for 5 minutes and leave it to burn to ash!

    FTFY

    @galgorah said:

    4) Anyone who cooks fish in the microwave.

    This makes me rage all the time.


  • @belgariontheking said:

    There is no disposal in our break room sink, so there's a sign up mentioning that fact and recommending we only rinse liquids down the drain.  

    Well where are we supposed to wash our dishes, hot shot?



  • @tster said:

    @galgorah said:

    4) Anyone who cooks fish in the microwave.

    This makes me rage all the time.

    I'm a vegetarian and I want to vomit whenever I smell seafood, especially in a microwave.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @galgorah said:

    4) Anyone who cooks fish in the microwave.

    I'm a vegetarian and I want to vomit whenever I smell seafood, especially in a microwave.

    * puts gator tail in the microwave *



  • @dhromed said:

    @galgorah said:

    Piss on the floor and occasionally a turd as well. 
     

    What.. the f... fuhhhck

    I...

    the fuck, yo. What sort of office was that?

    Unfortunately The office where I currently work. piss and poo seem to be an almost daily occurence.  I complain daily and the problem persists.



  • @galgorah said:

    Unfortunately The office where I currently work. piss and poo seem to be an almost daily occurence.  I complain daily and the problem persists.

    Am I the only one here who has come back from lunch completely wasted and needing to drop a wicked deuce and mistaken the sink or bathroom walls for the toilet?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Am I the only one here who has come back from lunch completely wasted and needing to drop a wicked deuce and mistaken the sink or bathroom walls for the toilet?
     

    No, of course not, but the rest of us have the sense of decency to at least try and push it through with hands wrapped in toilet paper and washing it down as best as we can, and then spraying generously with the air freshner.

    I mean really.

    Some standard pls.



  • I actually don't mind a bit of life around me while working. When I need silence to actually concentrate I'll just wear headphones (closed headphones so I don't annoy the crap out of my co-workers).

    I once worked at a company where the floor manager insisted on silence in a "Ordnung muss sein!" kind of way, which is arguably more annoying then any kind of noisy co-worker.



  • @stratos said:

    When I need silence to actually concentrate I'll just wear headphones (closed headphones so I don't annoy the crap out of my co-workers).
    My coworker has ear buds, but listens to music loud enough that I can still here it two offices down.

    One day I started hearing bagpipes. I thought, "OK, that weird charity down the road is playing bagpipes again," which had happened before. Bagpipes are fucking loud. But it turned out it was my coworker listening to bagpipes on earbuds. He was dumbfounded as to how I could hear them. I guess I have really good hearing or something, but still.

    My point is just because you think no one can hear your headphones doesn't mean no one can. You should just turn them the fuck down. I have mine loud enough to drown out the sounds of typing, and no louder. If I put my headphones down on the desk and walk away, I can't hear 'em, and that's the way it should be.



  • @Welbog said:

    One day I started hearing bagpipes. I thought, "OK, that weird charity down the road is playing bagpipes again," which had happened before. Bagpipes are fucking loud. But it turned out it was my coworker listening to bagpipes on earbuds. He was dumbfounded as to how I could hear them. I guess I have really good hearing or something, but still.
    I used to work in an office where some guy would go outside every day at lunch and practice his bagpipes.  Those things cannot be stopped by even the most advanced sound insulation techologies.



  • @bstorer said:

    Those things cannot be stopped by even the most advanced sound insulation techologies.
     

    You're just waiting for someone to post a link like this, right?


  • :belt_onion:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I'm a vegetarian and I want to vomit whenever I smell seafood, especially in a microwave.
    Vomiting in a microwave? Trying to recycle, are we?



  • @Welbog said:

    @stratos said:
    When I need silence to actually concentrate I'll just wear headphones (closed headphones so I don't annoy the crap out of my co-workers).
    My coworker has ear buds, but listens to music loud enough that I can still here it two offices down.

    One day I started hearing bagpipes. I thought, "OK, that weird charity down the road is playing bagpipes again," which had happened before. Bagpipes are fucking loud. But it turned out it was my coworker listening to bagpipes on earbuds. He was dumbfounded as to how I could hear them. I guess I have really good hearing or something, but still.

    My point is just because you think no one can hear your headphones doesn't mean no one can. You should just turn them the fuck down. I have mine loud enough to drown out the sounds of typing, and no louder. If I put my headphones down on the desk and walk away, I can't hear 'em, and that's the way it should be.

     

    Ummm earbuds != closed headphones. I could put my volume on "oh my god i'm bleeding out of my ears" and the guy next to me wouldn't hear a thing.The other obvious thing is that if you are bothered by the sound they produce, then fucking tell them. Don't go to the water cooler to bitch about it, don't start grumbling, just tell them.



  • @Welbog said:

    @stratos said:
    When I need silence to actually concentrate I'll just wear headphones (closed headphones so I don't annoy the crap out of my co-workers).
    My coworker has ear buds, but listens to music loud enough that I can still here it two offices down.

    One day I started hearing bagpipes. I thought, "OK, that weird charity down the road is playing bagpipes again," which had happened before. Bagpipes are fucking loud. But it turned out it was my coworker listening to bagpipes on earbuds. He was dumbfounded as to how I could hear them. I guess I have really good hearing or something, but still.

    My point is just because you think no one can hear your headphones doesn't mean no one can. You should just turn them the fuck down. I have mine loud enough to drown out the sounds of typing, and no louder. If I put my headphones down on the desk and walk away, I can't hear 'em, and that's the way it should be.

    I used to work with a guy who would listen to 1812 overture at top volume with his earbuds.  He'd play it a few times a day.  He also had a fully functional civil war era canon in his living room... said it was a family heirloom.... he was a bit strange....


  • @stratos said:

    I could put my volume on "oh my god i'm bleeding out of my ears" and the guy next to me wouldn't hear a thing.
     

    ... until you take them off and drown out even my own headphones! There's a guy like that at my work and his favourite genre is death metal.



  • @jpaull said:

    I have worked with a variety of people in my various jobs, but at every position there was always one or two that took the proverbial cake for their ability to be distracting/annoying. My own personal examples:

    1) The chain-smoking co-worker with the hacking cough (about every 5 minutes or so) that could wake the dead.

    2) The "rock star" that wore headphones but sang out loud and played the drum solos on their desk for all to hear.

    3) The amazingly annoying "laughing girl" who has you looking over the walls of your cube for the dying camel that has intruded into the office-space.

     Anyone have any interesting stories along these lines?

     

     

    No I can't hear anyone over my headphones and banging on my desk while I sing some tunes.



  • @Zemm said:

    @stratos said:

    I could put my volume on "oh my god i'm bleeding out of my ears" and the guy next to me wouldn't hear a thing.
     

    ... until you take them off and drown out even my own headphones! There's a guy like that at my work and his favourite genre is death metal.

     

    So? Tell him about the wonderful invention of the pause function and how to enable it before taking off his headphones?

    Bad manners are the problem, not the fact that people like to listen to music.



  • @stratos said:

    Bad manners are the problem, not the fact that people like to listen to music.

     This.



  • I listen to a lot of death metal, thrash, doom, etc.  But I hit pause before taking them off.  I also keep the volume at a reasonable level.  as was stated before this is called good manners.  At least he's not singing along to cradle of filth.  hopefully its good death metal though like cryptopsy, suffocation, obituary, etc.



  • @galgorah said:

    hopefully its good death metal
     

    I understand what you're saying but it's a bit moot if you don't like metal like me.

    Except Opeth <3 <3 <3

    (<3)



  • This doesn't happen often anymore because I think the novelty has worn off for most people, but I still have one coworker with sound effects for his Windows functions.  Incoming email, error dings, moving folders, etc.  He's a major trekker and guess what the sound effects are.  It doesn't bother me at all, but it does seem a tad pathetic.  A tiny bit embarrassing when I hear Majel Barrett over a conference call line because he's got his speakerphone on.

    One that really irritates me that nobody's mentioned are loud sneezers.  Usually men, but not all men.  Just the ones who feel compelled to put alot of voice into it.  There is no need to shriek when you sneeze, so stop it.




  • @bstorer said:

    @Welbog said:

    One day I started hearing bagpipes. I thought, "OK, that weird charity down the road is playing bagpipes again," which had happened before. Bagpipes are fucking loud. But it turned out it was my coworker listening to bagpipes on earbuds. He was dumbfounded as to how I could hear them. I guess I have really good hearing or something, but still.
    I used to work in an office where some guy would go outside every day at lunch and practice his bagpipes.  Those things cannot be stopped by even the most advanced sound insulation techologies.

     

    At my previous job it was a guy practicing trumpet.  Those things carry pretty well too.  Fortunately he would go all the way across the parking lot to do it, so you could usually only hear him when you were outside or if the wind happened to be blowing the right direction. Much better than the trumpeter in college who would practice in the stairwell of my dorm (though, to be fair, the rehearsal halls in music department were on another campus two towns over).

    My pet peeve now is a guy who brings a practice guitar (some sort of cut-down acoustic guitar with headphones) on the train every morning.  I know it's basically silent, except for the occasional overzealous string-pluck, but for some reason it still annoys the fuck out of me.  Like, can't you just read a newspaper or listen to an iPod like everyone else?

     



  • How about the guy that sits in front of me that seems to want to close all doors.  As if it's not dark enough without any windows in the building.  Sheesh!



  • I've got a Constantly Eating Mouth at my office.  He's a great guy and an awesome coworker generally, but he snacks constantly and, I guess, never learned to chew with his mouth closed.

    I also like the "Hey, it's ok if I heat up my Garlic-Broccoli-Fish stew and tuna-fish-salad sandwiches in the microwave, right?" person who has been a feature of every office environment I've worked in.



  • @UncleMidriff said:

    I also like the "Hey, it's ok if I heat up my Garlic-Broccoli-Fish stew and tuna-fish-salad sandwiches in the microwave, right?" person who has been a feature of every office environment I've worked in.

    This should be a capital offence. 


  • @galgorah said:

    @UncleMidriff said:

    I also like the "Hey, it's ok if I heat up my Garlic-Broccoli-Fish stew and tuna-fish-salad sandwiches in the microwave, right?" person who has been a feature of every office environment I've worked in.

    This should be a capital offence. 
    The latest addition to your signature is truly hilarious and entertained my coworkers well during lunch.  I recommend everyone give it a read, and thank you for posting such awesomeness.

    In other news, this one that's linked off the craigslist article is good too, but not as good.



  • @PJH said:

    5) The person who's expecting a support call on their mobile Soon[tm], then leaves it on their desk and dissappears for hour+ long meetings/lunch

    I found a very simple and quite tasty solution for this. Buy a pot of candy, stuff like gummy bears or something like that. Something that has a large chemical smell and is unresistant to eat.

    Soon you will have an empty pot, still smelling like candy. Which is a perfect container to put mobile phones in. You no longer hear them, and after the come out the phone will smell like candy for a while.



    If this won't work, fill the pot with water the next time. And put the phone in a drawer, as soon as the person sees the pot again he will thing "Ah, phone!" and will freak out for a moment when he notices the water.



    If that won't work. Let the phone swim.



    If that won't work (water resistant phone), concrete.



    (I've only had to do the first step a few times so far, but the amount of phone forgetting has dropped to almost 0 after that)



  • @UncleMidriff said:

    I've got a Constantly Eating Mouth at my office.  He's a great guy and an awesome coworker generally, but he snacks constantly and, I guess, never learned to chew with his mouth closed.

    I also like the "Hey, it's ok if I heat up my Garlic-Broccoli-Fish stew and tuna-fish-salad sandwiches in the microwave, right?" person who has been a feature of every office environment I've worked in.

     

     

    Ugh, yeah... I'm with morbiuswilters on the whole being a vegetarian and people cooking fish in the microwave thing.

    I've got a death metal loving graphic designer too but he has those nice headphones with noise isolation. It's just hard to get his attention for anything...

    At the moment the worst I have to contend with is mouth breathers... loud mouth breathers. In the office and on the phone, there's a particularly bad one that regularly calls for support. And seems to think I'm the only one that can fix anything which is probably true but mouth breathing down the phone is rather creepy.

    My boss and her two female thirtysomething co-workers in the next office (Yes I fit into that demographic too, but I'm not as loud) have what we like to call 'sleepover parties'. They like to have them first thing Monday morning, or any time I have to fix some sorta outage and the phones are going mad, or when I need a bit of quiet to get some coding done.



  • I'm surprised nobody has mentioned speakerphones.  I'm also surprised there aren't more murders reported where the victim was bludgeoned with their speakerphone.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @galgorah said:

    @UncleMidriff said:

    I also like the "Hey, it's ok if I heat up my Garlic-Broccoli-Fish stew and tuna-fish-salad sandwiches in the microwave, right?" person who has been a feature of every office environment I've worked in.

    This should be a capital offence. 
    The latest addition to your signature is truly hilarious and entertained my coworkers well during lunch.  I recommend everyone give it a read, and thank you for posting such awesomeness.

    In other news, this one that's linked off the craigslist article is good too, but not as good.

    I'm glad you liked it.  I'll add more the sig as I find them.



  • @jetcitywoman said:

    This doesn't happen often anymore because I think the novelty has worn off for most people, but I still have one coworker with sound effects for his Windows functions. 

    Not true.  I had a cube neighbor with the COMPLETE Simpsons sound effects and visual suite.  He actually helped me set up my avatar pic.  Hah!  Which was remarkably similar to his pic.  The worst part is that when he got an error, and he was a programmer so errors happened, Homer yelled, "D'OH!" and it made him laugh... every... time.  No, that wasn't the worst part.  The worst part was when he was doing a demo for a client, and the only working demo was on his computer, so he had to remote into his computer and guess whose head was right under the pointer.  If you said Homer, you would be correct.  It's a good thing that audio is not streamed over remote computer, because I believe that he was the only one that wasn't embarassed during that meeting.  My boss watched through his fingers the majority of the time.  The client noted the hilarity of bart being choked instead of having a boring old hour glass.

    I haven't seen this one yet, but I wrote an entire rant on it one day: the super-amazing, elite, your fingers would be nubs if you pounded this hard and went this fast, typist.  Even with my headphones volume up higher than I care to have them, I could still very distinctly here ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tack.  And you know that noise that's been keeping you up all night, then it finally goes away, and you praise the lord that the sound went away, you can finally get some sleep!  Only you hear it two seconds later.  Well, this was the story for me every day.  I would think, "Oh, good god she's done." I take a deep breath in and let it out... CLA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TACK!  (I was going to make that longer, but even I was annoyed.) I have to admit that watching her type was damn near amazing.  It just sucked hearing it.  It sounded like a fully automatic rifle.  We even tried to get her a keyboard with the soft keys, but she took it back to the storage room after a week because, "it just didn't feel right."  But it wasn't like she was using one of those older keyboards with an amplifier behind it, she was just using a regular Dell keyboard.  Intellisense: Ctrl+Space... she broke the space key.  It cracked in half.

    My absolute least favorite type of distracting coworker is the one who doesn't have very much to say in the first place, but somehow makes the conversation an hour long, if you're lucky.  And usually they complain about how much stuff they have to do.  When you see them you head for the bathroom so you don't get drawn into the vortex of questions and facts about how many orcs were killed in the awesome raid you missed last night... even though you've told him/her numerous times you don't play that game anymore.  Moreover, you could sit in your chair staring at them while they stare back at you from their perch on your desk, but they are somehow unperturbed for minutes on end.  I've even had one of them - there has been more than 5 now - damn near quote that conversation on Pulp Fiction about how it's nice to be able to be around someone and have a comfortable silence.  How do you respond to that?  "Yeah, I like silence at work.  Actually, when I'm working, I like to be silent and get to that work, so work can keep the hours that it needs and my personal life is not affected.  Yes, silence is golden.  You should be comfortable in silence elsewhere."


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Pope said:

    .  And you know that noise that's been keeping you up all night, then it finally goes away, and you praise the lord that the sound went away, you can finally get some sleep!  Only you hear it two seconds later.

    Trying to get to sleep in the same room as someone who snores constantly. Except when their sleep apnea kicks in.

    Either symptom by themselves wouldn't be a problem...</>



  • @Daid said:

    @PJH said:

    5) The person who's expecting a support call on their mobile Soon[tm], then leaves it on their desk and dissappears for hour+ long meetings/lunch

    I found a very simple and quite tasty solution for this. Buy a pot of candy, stuff like gummy bears or something like that. Something that has a large chemical smell and is unresistant to eat.
    Soon you will have an empty pot, still smelling like candy. Which is a perfect container to put mobile phones in. You no longer hear them, and after the come out the phone will smell like candy for a while.

    If this won't work, fill the pot with water the next time. And put the phone in a drawer, as soon as the person sees the pot again he will thing "Ah, phone!" and will freak out for a moment when he notices the water.

    If that won't work. Let the phone swim.

    If that won't work (water resistant phone), concrete.

    (I've only had to do the first step a few times so far, but the amount of phone forgetting has dropped to almost 0 after that)

    I have read this post a dozen times and it still makes no sense. The phone will smell like candy? So what? And if that doesn't work, I'm supposed to 'let it swim.' This is one of those Markov chain things, right?



  • @bridget99 said:

    I have read this post a dozen times and it still makes no sense. The phone will smell like candy? So what? And if that doesn't work, I'm supposed to 'let it swim.' This is one of those Markov chain things, right?

    It's a 3 step process to punish the cellphone user, stop doing the steps once the objective is complete. 1) Make the phone smell funny (which is somewhat lame) 2) They should figgure out that it has been moved to the pot (again, from step 1) which is now filled with water, (un)thankfully it wasn't. 3) Now it's in the pot and so is the water, but now you have to buy your coworker a new phone.



  • @Pope said:

    But it wasn't like she was using one of those older keyboards with an amplifier behind it, she was just using a regular Dell keyboard.  Intellisense: Ctrl+Space... she broke the space key.  It cracked in half.

     This is hilarious, I'd save that to display her bionic powers.


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