Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Dear outer-office-mate...

You've all heard me discuss the setup of the offices here. They are designed such that there is a front office, usually shared by 2-3 graduate students, and a back office, which houses a professor or post-doc. I am in a back office, of course, and I've discussed some of the issues with this arrangement. The most obvious annoyance has to do with walking through someone else's office to get to my own. This is not a huge issue, as many times the students are not around, and well, this is an annoyance all grad students have to deal with: a lot of traffic in one's office. I dealt with it in grad school, and that's fine.

Currently, though, my outer office houses a post-doc as well as two graduate students. The students are rarely there, but the pd has similar hours as myself. This is not an intrinsic problem (except for the previous issues I've discussed in regards to the pd closing the outer door while I'm here or his professor closing my door while they talk), but there is a minor irritation that is building and building. See the pd is Chinese, and as such, is still working on his English (he speaks quite well actually, and the only issue is generally vocabulary).

The problem here is that he has two habits, one of which I do not mind at all, but when combined with the other habit, I get rather annoyed. He has a device that when you type in a word, it reads it aloud, thereby allowing him to practice speaking. I think this is great, actually, and it is something that more non-native speakers should have. I do find it amusing, often, given the words he is practicing. This does not bother me at all, in and of itself.

However, his other habit is to talk to himself aloud all the time. Now, it's in English, so clearly he's doing what I do when I am at home, alone, and that is to speak a foreign language out loud to practice. It has gotten to a point where I want to scream at him but instead I put on my iPod and complain here.

The only thing that is keeping me going is that in a few months we'll all be moving out of this building to a temporary (for a year) location while this building gets renovated. At that point I won't have to deal anymore (although I'll be sharing an office, but most likely with a more tolerable person, as I'm pretty sure I know who it'll be).

by Topher at 10:54 AM |