Busy Status Bar

I had a coworker who felt free to interrupt me at any time. Even if I were frowning and leaning in to read some code word for word, he’d stop by to talk about nothing. I started wearing headphones when I was in concentration mode and that didn’t help. Then I wrote “DO NOT DISTURB” on a post-it note, stuck it to my headphones, and dug in for some thought-intensive hacking. He came to my desk, pulled the note off the headphones I wore, and tapped me on the shoulder, laughing. “Hah, look what someone taped to your head!”

We both learned something about the limits of my patience that day.

There's always that person. The only solution is renting your own office (not even home office unless one lives alone).

Murder is always an option. If you can get one thought worker on the jury, you'd never be convicted.

Surely it would be closer to justice if one were to dispatch the various management gurus and architects who claimed open plan was acceptable and any CEO who agreed with that garbage?

Here's a new idea, will it be adopted? Well does it increase office misery - then yes. If one idea gets past that goes the other direction its removal will be the most pressing management concern. Presently the biggest trend in the c-suite is how to end remote work in the face of all its positive metrics. Hot-desking, which has nothing positive about it for anyone, get behind it!

Can one volunteer for jury duty? Asking for a friend.

Got to love that productive office work for us swes.

> We both learned something about the limits of my patience that day.

Let me guess: you did absolutely nothing?

... or you could have communicated your boundaries & expectations first thing and explicitly instead of doing this weird song and dance and complain on hacker news about it afterwards?

Kinda sounds like I did and they kept ignoring them. Some of us try to approach problems like grownups, even if we leave the details out when they’d break the flow of a story.