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09/21/2004 Entry: "Keeping the volume low..." One of the things I *have* to remember is that I have a booming voice, and I am not alone in an office anymore. Not only does this mean, "Don't bug the other guy in the office with you," but it also means, "your voice echoes through the hallway, into the ventilation shaft, and around all the offices around you." This includes playing sounds. So don't discuss what hentai is to your office mate, even if he asks for you to explain it to him, and you want to give him the impression, "Hentai is just a SMALL part of anime." This goes double for the psychology behind bura-sera. Or thinking at 7:30am, you are the only one in the hallway, and you are playing a game of, "what's this wav file play?" (it wasn't dirty, it was just a Victor Borge bit). Twice in 24 hours I have been spoken to about my noise. When I move to a pod? This will be an even bigger problem. I will be buying headphones, and try and leave notes around that I should keep quiet, or at least lower my voice. Oops. Once, in another job, I got a death threat about it. Somewhere, in my files of stuff, I have saved the 1996 incident where someone left a death threat in my cubicle. Now, honestly, I didn't consider it to be a real death threat, but it went something like: every damn day i heard you talk about some weird shit, like about mormons, or how you never lend anyone your pocket knife. i don't give a shit about those things. you are so annoying, if i hear you one more time, i will be forced to kill you. It was actually a bit longer, with some more swear words, and lots of misspellings and grammar errors. I made comments in the note, posted it back in my pod, complete with corrections in spelling. My boss saw it, and asked who wrote it. I told him I didn't know. He then removed the note and reported it as a serious death threat. Now, my boss at the time was a great guy in so many ways, but I thought this was overkill. I just saw this as a guy venting their frustrations, and I put it up to remind me to keep my voice down. "It says he will be forced to kill you, we have to report this," said my boss, so HR came in, security got involved, and it was spoken about in a team meeting. I was "not allowed to say anything specific about the incident for security reasons," and that, "the writer, should they be found, will be terminated." Gees! I don't think they were serious! But then I got a story about how, at another building recently, someone was attacked and stabbed by a former coworker (or something), and yatta yatta yatta ... security-cakes. I never did find out if they actually found out who gave it to me (they even searched the printer buffers and logs), but finally, the whole thing settled down and that was that. The scuttlebutt later was that it was this other guy a few pods down in accounting, and he had "some issues," which led to his suicide a few months later. But this was gossip, along with a note about the gossip in my employee file which I got to keep after a job promotion. So ... now you can see why I am REALLY going to try and be a team player here, and keep my voice down, on topic, and play music via headphones. I don't want someone to kill themselves over my various off-topic rants ... heh.