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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

People put with noise far more than they have to. Here are a few of my experiences:

- moved into an office where a very noisy dot-matrix printer printed out every opening and closing of a door in the building. Nobody ever looked at the printouts. I unplugged it and put it in a dumpster. Nobody ever complained.

- working for an oil company, my boss was sitting next to a big HP plotter that was horribly noisy - he wore industrial-strength hearing protectors all the time, which didn't help if you wanted to phone him. I suggested that moving the plotter would be a good idea (there were lots of places to put it), but as usual with engineering companies, a sensible solution is not top of the list.

- howling air conditioning - that place I left after a couple of weeks.

Bottom line, there is no way you have to put up with noise - stand up for yourselves and just say "no".

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My biggest hurdle—aside from undocumented code—at my new company, is fucking mouth noises from coworkers and the sound of crumpling snack bags in an open office. It's to the extent where I have to leave the area and regain composure before mentioning it. If I can't find a way to manage, I'll leave, but I'm not in the financial position to have that luxury yet. What will probably happen, is I'll work up to a slow competency with their codebase, and they'll fire me before I get to quit. Optimistically I'll find a way to cope, either by dampening the noise or leaving the office for a coffee shop; something I've started doing.

Wow, you're even more noise sensitive that me. Suggestion: noise cancelling headphones. Good ones are really effective.

They do - bose qc20 have changed my life for the better.

I did work short term in an open office where someone suggested it was "rude" of me to wear earphones. Same person chewed with their mouth open while eating crunchy food at their desk all day, within earshot. But.... I'm rude somehow.

That is absolutely bananas

Your situation is so absurd that I'm immediately reminded of the film "Joe vs. the Volcano".

I think everyone here wishes you the best of luck.

I know he can get the job, but can he _do_ the job?

It can be a real struggle

Thank you kind stranger. Haven't heard of it but maybe I'll give it a watch. The synopsis sounds about right

When noise gets bad for me, I put in foam ear plugs, wear large headphones and use the following command to summon a pleasant oasis somewhere under a tropical waterfall far from the misophonic hell.

alias noise='play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth sine amod 0.02 80'

What does the play command come from?

it's included with sox

http://sox.sourceforge.net/Main/HomePage

Hey, thanks for the word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

For other people thinking of rolling their own solution, p5.js has a sound library that is easy to use; should be pretty quick to write a one-button webpage that makes pink noise.

https://p5js.org/reference/#/p5.Noise

I've noticed this particular kind of issue is helped significantly by white noise generators. The last office I worked in (i'm now remote) had a white noise generator built in that cancelled out a lot of those sounds like chip bags and chewing that are super jarring in a vacuum. I didn't even realize it was there until the day it broke down for a few hours and we ended up with a sudden eerie silence. Suddenly I was being bombarded with those kinds of noises that had never been very distracting before.

Maybe it's something you could suggest?

There are also apps like Noisli which are personal white noise machines. I find it works well when I need "quiet" time.

I would add myNoise. The free tier includes many free white noise generators: https://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php

Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't thought about a physical ambient noise generator. Typically I'll try and use Coffeetivity and music, but it gets tiresome.

I have the exact same trouble with mouth noises. I couldn't explain the extreme irrational anger I felt when a co-worker was chewing on something while others hardly even noticed. It used to be very unsettling before I came know that it was a known condition with an official name[1]. While knowing that hasn't cured it, if I encounter someone making these noises, to avoid outbursts, I am now quick to put on headphones and play white noise[2] and mentally telling myself that it's me, not them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzjWIxXBs_s

Yep, I become outwardly violent when I hear specific sounds. I have to physically leave the area to regain composure.

I had to do this recently when a co-worker was eating from a glass bowl and kept slamming the metal spoon around in it. I don't know if I was upset at the sound or the sheer inconsiderateness, but I had to get up and take a walk.

A few days ago, my adjacent coworker started cracking and eating eggs in whatever form they can be cracked and eaten as a solid. I was repulsed for obvious reasons, and angry because of the sound. It seems like a comedy

Are you talking about hard-boiled eggs?

I don't eat them myself, so I'd guess hardboiled ya. There is one way to do it that makes the shell soft I believe.

> physically leave the area to regain composure

This is what I have to do when I hear someone whistling in the office. Also other sounds and behaviours, i.e. the guy sitting next to me started clipping his nails at his desk one morning. I had to go stand outside for an hour before I calmed down.

I've definitely come across this and learned a bit about it. These links should be at least somewhat helpful for anyone in this thread who's unaware theirs a name. It's really distressing and I've come to realize that my dad and brother feel the same. In my case, I also have ADHD—or at least have been prescribed medication for it at 27—so being taken out of any zone I'd managed to get myself in is really unfortunate. Good luck with your solution! I've found headphones helpful, but at some point constant white noise gets tiresome and music loses its appeal.

I've been driven crazy by all that, and I won't say what else because I'm afraid that you'd notice it too.

What I'd suggest:

1. You're going to harp on it. It starts with the annoying sounds, but then you're telling yourself about how rude they are, how gross they are, the injustice of it all.

Yes, here and there you've got a point, but 99% of it is you trying to rationalize your feelings, and then it wants to assign blame because people are the perpetrators of it.

2. Take breaks to stop harping on it. I vape, so that's my excuse, but you don't even need one, you're just taking five minutes every hour or so to stretch your legs. Deliberately do something that occupies your mind and gets your stress levels down.

3. See if you can work from home a day a week, or even a half-day. Take vacation as regularly as possible.

I think it's both made worse by stress and increases stress levels, classic feedback loop, so my approach is to avoid it as much as possible and use other means to get my stress levels down.

You'll have good days and bad days, if you're really down and ready to yell at people, maybe talk to a shrink.

I think these are good on-point suggestions, all of which I'm doing to some extent. Outright blame is tough to control. I'm trying to continually remind myself that those are my opinions of their behaviour, and they just are habituated to that for whatever reason. I can't assume that, particularly in an ethnically diverse office, everyone would have an identical institutionalized definition of polite. Also that my experience of it is rational, in so much as something uncontrollable couldn't be irrational, and that's just better to find a way to work with or around.

Thankfully, this is a relatively small and flat org that somewhat embraces autonomy. I personally take as many breaks as I can or want because it's still part of work. Likewise working out of a coffee shop is something I'm very comfortable with, so I've started doing that as well. Working from home is less common here, so that'll be a discussion I think.

Also thanks for not mentioning whatever the other one was. The sounds I'm fully stressed about are the ones I mentioned, but others are just revolting in a vaccuum. Like farts, audible burps, coughing without covering.

You might be suffering from misophonia. It is a condition where you are extremely sensitive to certain classes of sounds, eating noises being one of the most common. Some self help patient groups do exist, but the condition is not well treatable.

I worked in a place where my team of 8 was right next to a door that loudly clanged shut whenever one of the 150 people in the company used it, and they did 90% of the time as most of the desks were closer to that door. Well, it was kind of annoying, I had to constantly re-prop the door, and we weren't allowed to put signage or a door stop...maybe due to fire hazards or regulations?

The main issue: Upper management didn't care, they all had their own offices that were removed and much nicer. The rest of us peons were in an open office hell, my team was on an island that anyone could walk around at any time...we were unmoored and near a clangy door, it was very hard to focus.

I can top that. I sit right next to a Very Important Executive, who has an office with a door that closes (I, of course, as a very unimportant peon, sit in a noisy open office next to QA people who are testing voice-activated devices all day). However, VIE’s office gets hot if he closes the door, so he leaves it open all day. He also doesn’t like to use his telephone headset, so he leaves his phone on speaker. All day. Every day. And the thing is, he’s actually a really nice guy - it’s like it never occurs to him what an inconsiderate officemate he’s being to everybody around him.

It probably doesn't occur to him. What's the worst that could happen if you let him know?

Usually door closers have a setting to slow down just before the door really closes, it can be adjusted to slow down the door further.

Anecdotally, when I'm playing speed rounds on lichess if there’s any kind of background noise my score drops by 200 point instantly. I find that a good proxy for high-concentration activity and this realization made me change my routine to spend at least half of my office hours when there’s no one around.

“I unplugged it and put it in a dumpster. Nobody ever complained.”

Amazing. Good work.

That said, it is still probably the correct place to put my observation (unless original author comes around to post it too ...):

At one point I sat for months in a radio room, next to a really noise rack. Temperature was often 30 degrees C.

The reason I sat there was because the sound of the fans were much easier to block out than people (without support contracts : ) popping in to ask questions while I where supposed to help people who had support contracts.

We moved this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566305 to be a child of the post it is actually a reply to.

- Asking your co-worker to mute their computer speakers whenever a "Slack Chime" plays loudly in the open office.

(the better solution of course is to fully mute these notifications in Slack)

I'm curious about this door access printer. Wonder if it was some attempt at building access logs, or if it was the product of some engineers having a slow day.

The first story gave me a real laugh, thanks & well done! You dared to innovate!

Did you mean to post here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565841

That's what I was thinking. I had both open in tabs from the front page. I can see someone getting mixed up doing the same.

We've moved it to the noise thread from the air pollution thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565624, where it was originally posted.

That was a very, very stupid thing to do.

https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-parable-of-chestertons-fen...

The logical conclusion to this is that we should not take any action in the face of incomplete information or uncertainty. This is typical of the dogmatic approach to reasoning that you find in many religious texts. The action of taking down the fence may not be based on ignorance, so much as curiosity. This could be viewed as subversive, and we can’t have that now can we?

> The action of taking down the fence may not be based on ignorance, so much as curiosity

While I sort of agree, it's not about a fence but getting as much info as reasonably possible before acting. Next time you change something you don't understand because of curiosity, there may be injuries or deaths.

> This is typical of the dogmatic approach to reasoning that you find in many religious texts

That's pretty much what you've done here; taken the extreme view of what I'm trying to say.

Back on the subject: the dot matrix printer was not the guy's property and it may have been streaming a hardcopy of some server's intrusion log. That would explain why it was there but nobody looked. It's there in case someone ever needed to.

(edit: it's printed door movements, not server stuff. If the doors are opened by badges, it's still movement detection, at least of the most basic, people-y, sort)

That isn't at all the logical conclusion. You're projecting your dislike of religion and ironically being just as dogmatic in your dismissal. They were responding to the TLC poster saying they threw away a piece of machinery just because it was loud and they didn't see anyone using it. Given that characterization, would you say they were acting out of curiosity? Curiosity would be asking people what it was for before throwing it away - which is what the parable implores.

This is one of these interesting issues that you can use to tell conservatives from progressive types. In some cases, there might indeed be some valid reason behind some old rule that currently seems elusive, but in many cases it's just superstition, and in any case you often can't find it out unless you challenge the rule.

Agreed! - so walk down the corridor and find out why.

Think: someone must have been feeding the printer paper or it would have run out years ago. It's there for a reason. See possibly why in my other comment.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yep, sorry, but at the very least destroying your employer's property... I mean, do I have to spell it out.

I do agree to an extent: he probably should have just hidden the printer away somewhere where it would have probably not been found. Then, if it caused a big scandal, the printer could have mysteriously "reappeared", otherwise if no one complained, it could just stay there for years on end.

Chesterton's Fence works when the people in authority are willing and able to change things with adequate understanding and justification. Sometimes no one knows why the thing is there and the options are remove it and see what happens or keep devoting resources and accommodations to it while it reduces quality of life.

I'm usually critical of SV style creative destruction, but sometimes asking for forgiveness instead of permission really is the only way to get things done. As long as it's a strategy, not the strategy.

Asking someone why the printer does that would have been good. It would have been an opportunity to show initiative to superiors either way. One way you get to remove something everyone hates. Another way you get to find a less intrusive system to solve whatever problem the printouts solve.

It may not have been a problem as they suggest, but not hearing anything is not the same as not causing a problem. I've had people just do things thinking I was making up the issue with what they wanted to do. Of course, it caused the problem, and I didn't know the source until they mockingly said "I did it and you never complained!"

>Asking someone why the printer does that would have been good. It would have been an opportunity to show initiative to superiors either way. One way you get to remove something everyone hates. Another way you get to find a less intrusive system to solve whatever problem the printouts solve.

There's a big downside here. If he had asked the purpose of the printer, that would have identified him as the one who disliked it, and the most likely perpetrator if something happened to it.

Also remember the old saying, "it's always better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission". It's true usually. If he had asked to do something about the printer, the likely answer would have been "no", because the superiors didn't want to expend any energy on it and it wasn't bothering them.

The linked article doesn't mention noise as the subject of the article - the word appears once on the page. Are you in the right place?

> The linked article mentions noise

I guess so.

Although not about noise pollution, it does bring to mind the question of how well some of these studies might have controlled for the effect of noise pollution, which would likely have an effect on cognition, and correlate with air pollution.

Not sure how controlling for noise pollution affects studying air pollution - can you elucidate? Still, I don't understand how noise pollution anecdotes are relevant to an article on air pollution.

I think the anecdotal comment was actually meant for a different discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565841).

I think you're right. But commenter disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566256

Likely because they didn't actually check the context.

I want to ask you the same question. I wonder if it's a bug? The link I see at the top goes here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191115-office-noise-a...

I double-checked myself every time I came back. And now, this is on the "Office noise" article. I don't have screenshots, so I have no idea what happened.

Yeah, could be a bug. I was confused by your comment for a while.

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