Put me down on the murmur side of the column.
I share a large MAXI-Cube with three women. We each have our own decent-sized alcove with our own little cell and bookshelf that we can arrange our little fillips to individuality.
This is fine. True, I am an anti-social swine and my days are mostly spent weaving elaborate revenge fantasies against my enemies (people who speak loudly on the train, or the tourists riding the top level double-decker bus who dare peer at me… you know, ENEMIES, but these three women are modicums of tolerance. They are always considerate, kind and appropriately friendly with me, a sort of vile Quasimodo-like bastard. Nice, nice people. Very charitable.
But here’s the thing; they whisper. Not about me. About work. This is because, I think, they work in a different department then I do, and do not want to throw their garbage in my yard. They also share managerial duties over a fairly large group of people, and so obviously and correctly must maintain discretion.
But goddamn, the whispering gets to me. If you have ever lived with mice in your walls, you know the feeling; the high frequency skittering that picks at your brain when you’re at the edge of sleep.
I’m all for murmuring. Murmuring happens at the frequency of conversation, so it doesn’t ring some reptilian brain bell, alerting you to the fact you are about to swarmed and eaten alive by scores and scores of fangy little mice. (They go for the eyes first, you know). Murmurs don’t rustle, or twitter. They rrrrollll and bump.
If I were a spy or a cat thief, I’d murmur.
But here’s the rub, and something tending toward a point (as close as we’re going to get in this post): how do you, or do you even, enter that conversation.
“Hey yers, just a point of style… could you murmur? Sort of like this: murmurmurmurmur? I respect the gravity of your communications, but the hissing found at the peaks of your delivery has on occasion shown me the shores of insanity.”
Seems churlish to me.
Also, C., a fellow copywriter, laughs very hard at his own jokes. It bums me out.
This is fine. True, I am an anti-social swine and my days are mostly spent weaving elaborate revenge fantasies against my enemies (people who speak loudly on the train, or the tourists riding the top level double-decker bus who dare peer at me… you know, ENEMIES, but these three women are modicums of tolerance. They are always considerate, kind and appropriately friendly with me, a sort of vile Quasimodo-like bastard. Nice, nice people. Very charitable.
But here’s the thing; they whisper. Not about me. About work. This is because, I think, they work in a different department then I do, and do not want to throw their garbage in my yard. They also share managerial duties over a fairly large group of people, and so obviously and correctly must maintain discretion.
But goddamn, the whispering gets to me. If you have ever lived with mice in your walls, you know the feeling; the high frequency skittering that picks at your brain when you’re at the edge of sleep.
I’m all for murmuring. Murmuring happens at the frequency of conversation, so it doesn’t ring some reptilian brain bell, alerting you to the fact you are about to swarmed and eaten alive by scores and scores of fangy little mice. (They go for the eyes first, you know). Murmurs don’t rustle, or twitter. They rrrrollll and bump.
If I were a spy or a cat thief, I’d murmur.
But here’s the rub, and something tending toward a point (as close as we’re going to get in this post): how do you, or do you even, enter that conversation.
“Hey yers, just a point of style… could you murmur? Sort of like this: murmurmurmurmur? I respect the gravity of your communications, but the hissing found at the peaks of your delivery has on occasion shown me the shores of insanity.”
Seems churlish to me.
Also, C., a fellow copywriter, laughs very hard at his own jokes. It bums me out.
Labels: My Idiotic Job, Weltschmerz
posted by Greg Mills at 1:26 PM
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