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Office noise bothers some people more than others

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Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#131

Post by MereInterest »

mikece wrote: post #122

Noise can be blocked out for the most part: either noise-cancelling headsets (or turning the volume up to 11) to get block out noise-based distractions. But silence or not, what is more disrupting to me are the interruptions from email, slack, or a coworker (or boss!) stopping by or asking a question that could have waited. The real problem is task switching and if it knocks you out of flow it's a productivity killer…

Noise-canceling headsets work for repetitive noises that are easily predictable, such as engine noise. Human speech is very unpredictable, and noise-canceling headsets have very little impact on them. Turning up the volume on headphones quickly leads to hearing loss, and should never be the recommended solution.

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#132

Post by neverartful »

734129837261 wrote: post #67

My biggest triggers are people who eat crunchy food with open mouths; people who slurp their drinks; people who are oblivious to their environment and sing loudly in open offices. Colleagues next to me eating hard carrots, chips, anything crunchy. Or Chinese expats who slurp their soup and coffee (normal in their culture; rude in mine)... it drove me crazy. The singing one drove me insane at my last job. An office la…

Some of the sounds (in addition to those already mentioned) that do (or have) driven me nuts: fast scraping to get last bit of yogurt from plastic container with plastic spoon, chewing/cracking gum where the chewer makes little air bubbles in the gum and then pops them (x10 if they're chewing with their mouth open), whistling, humming, tapping fingernails against table top, tapping foot against floor/chair/desk, digging in purse, cell phone ringing/dinging/alerts, sighing.

I once worked with a guy whose normal breathing made a whistling sound. I was sitting about 20 feet from him and one day I was about to go insane. I immediately bought a pair of Bose QC-15 headphones and it made all the difference in the world.

Currently, there's a lady who sits on the other side of my cubicle wall who wears a charm bracelet. The sound of her charm bracelet hitting and dragging across the desktop all day drives me batty.

I suppose I must have misophonia (first heard about it in this thread). There are times when I wish I were deaf.

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#133

Post by cowpewter »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #123
rhizome wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nicotine gum is as expensive as cigarettes, if not more. I spend about $30/year for my vape supplies. I buy juice by the liter and the coils are the only other consumable and those are about $2 apiece every few months.

Presumably you could make your own gum (coat regular sugar-free gum?) using the same nicotine solution that vapers use.

Coating regular gum would probably not work. The nicotine is embedded in the gum base itself. That's why the instructions for using nicotine gum say to chew just long enough for you to feel the tingle that nicotine creates against your oral mucosa, then tuck it between your gum and cheek for 30ish minutes or until the tingling stops. Then you give it another couple chews, just enough to expose more of the nicotine to the surface, and place it between gum and cheek again.

The nicotine is slowly absorbed through the oral mucosa. Coating the gum would give you an initial burst of nicotine, but would not have the sustained drip of nicotine that the traditional nic gum does.

I suppose one could melt down gum base, add a vaping nicotine solution, stir it together, let it set and then cut into pieces... but I would worry about the PG or VG that the nicotine is contained in doing something weird to the gum base. And you would have to be careful to stir it quite thoroughly to prevent nicotine "hot spots" in your gum.

Making a homemade lozenge or mint would be much easier, and I believe some people do, in fact, do just that. It would be similar to making hard candies, only at some point you would mix in the nicotine liquid. Since many of the flavorings used in vape juice were originally designed for use in baking and hard candies (and usually have a PG or sometimes VG base), I'm pretty certain the PG or VG of the nicotine won't screw up the texture of the candy.

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#134

Post by pkamb »

zabzonk wrote: post #7

People put with noise far more than they have to. Here are a few of my experiences: - moved into an office where a very noisy dot-matrix printer printed out every opening and closing of a door in the building. Nobody ever looked at the printouts. I unplugged it and put it in a dumpster. Nobody ever complained. - working for an oil company, my boss was sitting next to a big HP plotter that was horribly noisy - he wore…

- Asking your co-worker to mute their computer speakers whenever a "Slack Chime" plays loudly in the open office.

(the better solution of course is to fully mute these notifications in Slack)

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#135

Post by navs »

I currently work for a startup and all three of us are hotdesking. We're constantly moved to new spaces in the hotdesking space because a new company is leaving/moving in. I've sat beside recruiters, property managers and salespeople.

There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked. My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their should be and a room beside the kitchen which is used late in the night.

The only quiet I can wrangle is a few hours at a local library on weekends before the kids come in for the reading and writing sessions.

The noise has gotten bad enough that I'm considering quitting my job and running away to a small town.

Yes, you can use noise cancelling headphones but:

1. They're uncomfortable for long periods

2. They don't really block all the noise and you live in anxiety waiting for that one blaring ringtone to squeeze through

3. I find it difficult to concentrate with them on. It feels like a heavy, constricting object squeezing my temples.

No solutions, just a rant.

EDIT: Thinking about it some more on the transit to work this morning. I believe the constant battering to my senses has made me more irritable. I tend to avoid my flatmates and reply with dismissive grunts and hand waves. Ditto for people in the shared space. Small things upset me even more. A failed build pipeline or a new Jira request will infuriate me. I've been countering this with more breaks from the screen to take walks around the office block.

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#136

Post by joegahona »

navs wrote: post #135

I currently work for a startup and all three of us are hotdesking. We're constantly moved to new spaces in the hotdesking space because a new company is leaving/moving in. I've sat beside recruiters, property managers and salespeople. There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked. My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their…

I am finding No. 1 and No. 3 to be absolutely true in my new job (open office). Loved my Bose QC headphones when I was using them occasionally at a coffeshop or on short flights, but for 6-8 hours? I'm finding that I'm leaving work with a headache now. It's making me consider the Airpods Pro since they're not vice-like but do include noise-canceling.

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#137

Post by pkaye »

navs wrote: post #135

I currently work for a startup and all three of us are hotdesking. We're constantly moved to new spaces in the hotdesking space because a new company is leaving/moving in. I've sat beside recruiters, property managers and salespeople. There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked. My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their…

> The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked.

Is this one of those "we work" type of environments where everything is rented piece meal?

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#138

Post by kedean »

brailsafe wrote: post #36
zabzonk wrote: post #7

People put with noise far more than they have to. Here are a few of my experiences: - moved into an office where a very noisy dot-matrix printer printed out every opening and closing of a door in the building. Nobody ever looked at the printouts. I unplugged it and put it in a dumpster. Nobody ever complained. - working for an oil company, my boss was sitting next to a big HP plotter that was horribly noisy - he wore…

My biggest hurdle—aside from undocumented code—at my new company, is fucking mouth noises from coworkers and the sound of crumpling snack bags in an open office. It's to the extent where I have to leave the area and regain composure before mentioning it. If I can't find a way to manage, I'll leave, but I'm not in the financial position to have that luxury yet. What will probably happen, is I'll work up to a slow comp…

I've noticed this particular kind of issue is helped significantly by white noise generators. The last office I worked in (i'm now remote) had a white noise generator built in that cancelled out a lot of those sounds like chip bags and chewing that are super jarring in a vacuum. I didn't even realize it was there until the day it broke down for a few hours and we ended up with a sudden eerie silence. Suddenly I was being bombarded with those kinds of noises that had never been very distracting before.

Maybe it's something you could suggest?

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#139

Post by saltcured »

yla92 wrote: post #48

I am curious about this. Do people who work in the open plan office, feel bothered by clicky mechanical keyboard sounds (cherry mx blue, greeen etc)?

Your question made me think way back to shared terminal labs where the terminals made an electronic noise for each key press, either a short beep or a harder click. I imagined this feature was an already anachronistic crutch for people who remembered typewriters and typing pools.

At university, I shared an office with a student who made so much noise typing that I could only stop and ponder with amazement. This guy typed like the keyboard was a piece of meat, and his hands were basting mops. Somehow, his fingers mashed out whole words and phrases as he dragged his paws across the keys.

Re: Office noise bothers some people more than others

#140

Post by PuddleOfSausage »

commandlinefan wrote: post #113
WhompingWindows wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in a place where my team of 8 was right next to a door that loudly clanged shut whenever one of the 150 people in the company used it, and they did 90% of the time as most of the desks were closer to that door. Well, it was kind of annoying, I had to constantly re-prop the door, and we weren't allowed to put signage or a door stop...maybe due to fire hazards or regulations? The main issue: Upper management d…

I can top that. I sit right next to a Very Important Executive, who has an office with a door that closes (I, of course, as a very unimportant peon, sit in a noisy open office next to QA people who are testing voice-activated devices all day). However, VIE’s office gets hot if he closes the door, so he leaves it open all day. He also doesn’t like to use his telephone headset, so he leaves his phone on speaker. All da…

It probably doesn't occur to him. What's the worst that could happen if you let him know?
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