You are a hypocrite!

I work in an office environment where silence, if not paramount, is very important for the quality of work. Academic editing requires a lot of concentration and can be taxing. So, editors need a release too. In such an environment, the time and method of release chosen by a particular person might conflict with the work of others working nearby. It can be annoying if a person a group constantly creates a lot of noise, especially laughter and/or giggling.

My office unfortunately has such a group of people who, despite repeated warnings, carry on laughing loud and giggling. During these episodes, they fail to control the decibel levels of their conversations too. To avoid getting distracted, you could possibly listen to music. But when you are trying to read sentences aloud in your mind to try and understand and edit them, music is also a hindrance sometimes. There is no other way but hope that these people would stop and realize others are getting affected by it.

I tried to talk to a member of this group and let that person know what exactly the issue is. One day, in the evening, the person appeared to be apologetic and promised to be careful in the future. The very next day, after repetition of the same unruly behavior, and after it was pointed out, the same person was aggressive and rude. The ego was offended and exploded like a volcano. The person started pointing out other groups of people having small conversations in the office and went on to insist that I was being biased against him/her.

I tried to tell the person that I have features of adult ADD and I am particularly sensitive to noise and get distracted very easily. Even that backfired. I was told that I am trying to hide behind the façade of ‘mental conditions’ and I wanted everyone to work in a way that I wanted them to. Eventually, I ended up being called a ‘hypocrite’ for being only sensitive to the noise created by a particular group. I decided that it was best to end the conversation at that.

What would you have done in the same situation?

A social/familial misfit

This Sunday evening, during a break during my songwriting/recording sessions, I logged on to the personal messengers. I found my sister online and started chatting with her. She told me that our cousins were all there visiting her. She also told me that she was chatting from the laptop that she had bought for my mother. She was actually testing the internet connection.

She asked me if I could help her check the bandwidth by video-chatting. I was feeling relatively okay then and said okay. We got connected over poor quality 'broadband' at their end. I saw my cousins huddled together around the computer.

We couldn't really 'talk' to each other thanks to the connection. And there was a whole lot of noise coming from their end. Too many people - three cousins, my sister, my parents, and my wailing niece - and too many conversations going on at the same time. A nightmare for a noise-conscious, ADD-esque, social phobic person like me. I tried working some humor, but my tastes of humor were not quite up to the tastes of my family - innuendos don't work, and any humor that I used came through as heavy sharp-toothed sarcasm, which doesn't really work with my family, except for a few uncles.

So, it was a less than memorable experience and I had to finally make an excuse of having to 'make' my dinner to get out of it. This made me so acutely aware of how much of a social misfit I will be if I ever dared to visit my family as I know it.

First day at work

So I started working today. A totally new environment so alien that it felt really weird. Out of scrubs and lab coats, not standing at an operating table, not talking to the needy and not saving lives. Instead, in my jeans and tee shirt, sitting at a desk, talking to no-one and learning grammar. In came the world filled with deadlines and assignments and out went the world with intravenous lines and surgeries. That’s one helluva change.

I met new people. New colleagues, new trainers, new bosses. Apart from the trainer, I couldn’t really talk to anyone there. It really seemed like an invasion of privacy. They were doing jobs and had to meet deadlines. I can’t talk to them and disturb their work. That’s not civil. Not only that, I was given a computer and some lessons and exercises about English grammar and punctuation. I had to work on that as well.

I tried to concentrate on what I was doing. I found it extremely hard because I could hear everyone talking, gossiping, laughing. I could also hear filtered music leaking out of the earphones of a colleague sitting next to me (so clearly that I could identify the artist!). I have never been diagnosed as ADHD. But I think I’m a subclinical ADHD person. The only resort was to get lost in my own music despite it being an impediment to the functioning of my brain which is trying to solve complicated grammatical problems.

I’m sure things will get better and more ‘relaxed’, but not in a jiffy.