Re: The Sound of Silence
I used to have a colleague who lived to annoy me with his constant barrage of noise. His painfully squeaky swivel chair, his loud and annoying Fran Drescher nasal drone telling the same joke over the phone at volume 11 to everyone on his contact list, the noise was endless. I would stay late and get more done in the two hours after he'd left than in the seven he was there.
Then he started leaving his workstation beeping when he left work and locking the desktop. I thought about hacking the bios. I thought about cutting the MB speaker wires. Then I realized I was *over* thinking and just unplugged his computer, gave it a five-count and plugged it back in.
He did a lot of data entry and would leave a bunch of stuff on his screen to be done the next day. All gone now of course.
Took him three days to learn.
As for his squeaky swivel chair, I went and found the only unused new chair in the place and swapped his for that. He yelled and screamed and took his original back. So I bought a small can of WD40 and carefully oiled the wheels and the center column when he was gone, cleaning the oil off so it wouldn't foul his clothes.
The first day after I did this he sat down and 720-ed, leaping up and glaring at the super-silent chair, then me (straight-faced c/w halo). He tried to grind the bearing and it just moved silently. He pushed back in it and went sailing across the room into a row of disused servers - because the castors worked like wheels now instead of like round carpet-skis. He was completely dumbfounded. He was conviced it wasn't his chair, but then, it obviously was.
He would try and get it squeaking at every opportunity, grinding the seat back and forth, and it would start making noises about every two weeks, whereupon it got a nice new dose of WD40.
One day he came in, glared at me, sat down and gave the chair a particularly savage grinding with his arse. The center post snapped and he crashed to the floor like a felled oak. I admit I had to turn away and bite my hand to avoid being found out.
All this from a man who berated another colleague saying that the sound of a boiling (non-whistle) kettle ten feet away was "distracting him from his work". He said the colleague would have to stand by the kettle while it boiled to minimize the annoyance.
If you want to know what Yodel Shriekenhowl looked like, see if you can get a look at the 30 year anniversary DVD movie of Jean-Michel Jarre re-recording Oxygene. The bloke playing the keyboards on the extreme left as you watch is his identical twin brother, except he's quieter. I showed some people at work the movie and they couldn't tell it wasn't Foghorn Leghorn.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
