I work for a great company. The benefits are good, the atmosphere is energetic, but friendly, and the people are great. Well, mostly great. Some of them are - duh, duh, DUH - Speakerphone Addicts.
Now Speakerphones are wonderfully useful tools when you need to connect a group of people in one location with one or more people in another location. These different locations could be different cities (like Oz and Kansas City), or different buildings (like the Capitol and the White House), different floors of the same building (like the dungeon and the tower), or even different areas of the same floor (like the Pentagon, where it can be a half-day field trip to find another office).
Sometimes, groups have to talk to each other on Speakerphones because there is no room large enough to hold everybody at the same time. That is another type of Speakerphone Hell from the one I want to whine about today.
As I said, I work for a great company. We are growing rather rapidly of late and most people sit in barely partitioned cubicles with no doors. (Cubicles with doors would be kind of silly, but think of the aesthetic possibilities! I digress.) And yet, there are people who talk on Speakerphone to people who are just two or three cubicles away! This means that you get to hear both ends of the conversation - twice.
If you happen to sit between the two callers, it's enough to give you flashbacks to Woodstock, even if your mother wasn't even born then. The echo effect borders on the surrreal, but is solidly in the realm of Really Annoying, and is definitely on the short list for the "What the Hell is the Matter With You?" prize of the day.
Listen, Speakerphone Addicts, if getting up and walking to the cube of the person you are talking to is really that much of a burden, PICK UP THE DANG PHONE! Get a headset, if you need to have your hands free. Schedule a conference room, if you need to accomodate a lot of people, but leave me out of your conversations! I know there are the occasional emergencies, but I've got my own deadlines and issues. I do not want to hear all the different things you've tried and failed at; I do not want to hear your opinions on someone else's work; and I really, REALLY do not want to hear arguments about where to go for Happy Hour - especially in stereo!
Whew! I feel strangely calm and relaxed now. OK. Fine. Bye.
