@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."