V
I have to say, I sympathise with you. I get a lot of guys wandering round here having conversations loudly on their mobile phones (mostly personal calls), and that gets pretty irritating. I eventually got rid of one persistent perpetrator just by interrupting his call, and asking him to take his conversation elsewhere. Very politely, you understand, but quite insistently, so that his phone call was well messed up by the time I'd finished talking to him, explaining that there were plenty of other places he could go etc etc blah. He hasn't come back. As to the general din, the only thing is to push for a quiet area where you can get installed. If it's a productivity issue (it is), then management should listen to that, especially in times like these, when they are probably unwilling to hire more staff.