Barnyard impersonations
Monica asks, in reponse to an earlier post about the guy who complained about people eating at their desks:
I’ve got a coworker who apparently figured out how to eat by watching barnyard animals or something. You can hear the guy chewing pizza from 30 feet away, and crunchy stuff like chips is worse. He snacks at his desk extensively. It’s really revolting. Fortunately for me the problem has now been reduced to lunch meetings; after a recent office shuffle he no longer sits 20 feet from me. But I never figured out how to tell the guy that he’s pretty far outside the norm and it grosses me out; I feel like avoiding him is cheating, but that’s what I do. Any advice?
Oh yuck. This is one of the most unbearable things in the workplace. I’m not sure there’s a single good solution here, but I can offer a selection of ideas you might not yet have tried:
- Talk to your manager or HR and ask if they could have a quiet word. Unfortunately, even if they do, it’s unlikely to stick, since anyone who’s reached adulthood eating that noisily has the habit fairly ingrained.
- Try to change workplace culture so that eating at desks is frowned upon in general, then encourage this guy to eat elsewhere. If you already have a lunchroom, or similar, that might help. You could combine it with the previous idea, so that HR issue a general request for people not to eat at their desks. The upside is that it might be easier to change his big habits than his small habits. The downside is that the workplace in general might see it as excessive officiousness.
- Work up the guts to talk to him about it directly. Note: it’ll be a ghastly conversation and probably won’t help.
- Wear headphones at your desk so you can’t hear him.
- Sit him next to the noisy server farm so he’s drowned out by the white noise.
- Send an anonymous email telling him he’s disgusting. (This is, in itself, kind of rude.)
- Point him to GE and hope he takes the hint. (This is somewhat less rude, but I don’t mind acting as the hint delivery mechanism.)
Sorry, that’s all I’ve got. Though if it’s any consolation, it seems like noisy eaters are a perennial problem — somewhere amongst my collection of etiquette books, I’ve got 15th century texts telling people not to chew too loudly.
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Gees, talking to a manager or HR seems terribly passive-aggressive and quite rude.
You’re not likely to change how this guy eats, so you may be labelling yourself as a complainer and whiner by taking it to management.
More useful is to just get over yourself and realize the world is sometimes offensive. How you deal with that defines you as a person and how others see you as a person.
Joe: mmmm, I suspect it depends on the workplace and how you do it. I should’ve been more clear that I’m not talking about a formal complaint. More like “Hey, we’ve got this guy who always eats at his desk, and nobody wants to sit near him ’cause he’s kinda noisy and gross. Any suggestions? Don’t suppose you could have a quiet word sometime, could you?”
I suspect that there are some workplace cultures where that would be acceptable, and some where it wouldn’t.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that Noisy Eater isn’t likely to change his ways anyway, no matter who talks to him.
Perhaps it just comes back to “be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept”. The onus is on the eater to be quiet, and on the hearer to deal with it if he doesn’t.
*sigh*
“Perhaps it just comes back to “be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept”. The onus is on the eater to be quiet, and on the hearer to deal with it if he doesn’t.”
Yeah, I think that’s about right. Not always pleasant, but the best practice to follow in society. It’s something I strive to do in general.
I would be reluctant to try to change workplace culture (or rules) on account of one person. It feels like collective punishment, sort of like how many web sites are blocked for all of us because one doofus was caught surfing porn on the company computer.
The server-farm suggestion is clever and the headphones suggestion expedient. Thanks.
Various comments:
1) I’m a big advocate of dealing with problems directly, and while conflict resolution may not necessarily be an etiquette issue, your suggestion of speaking to a supervisor seems ineffective and rude.
If I were the supervisor, my first question would be “Have you spoken to him or her about this?” If the answer is no, I’m going to suggest you have that conversation first (which you seem to think it’s best to avoid the “ghastly” conversation). In my mind, it’s imperative to have that conversation if you want them to change their behavior, and asking your supervisor to say something you wouldn’t have said is reminiscent of a child tattling on someone else. Informally or not, this kind of behavior should not be acceptable in any organization, unless you’ve tried to address the situation yourself first. If you tell me you’re unwilling to have that conversation, then depending on how imperative the issue is to you, I’d tell you to either learn to accommodate the behavior, or walk you over to them, and initiate the conversation with “Hey MrChew, MrAnnoyed has something they’d like to speak with you about.” Yes, you’re stepping on some toes, and making people uncomfortable, but conflict resolution requires directness and candor.
That being said, I probably wouldn’t pick this as one of my battles, since the behavior is likely ingrained, and I would “cheat” and avoid the obnoxious mastication.
2) Why don’t you have a submission form or some way for readers to email you directly?
3) How about a series of posts on email etiquette? Granted, it’s a popular topic, but lots of material there. This was mainly brought on to me as I was thinking about forwards. I tend to top-quote, and add a tidbit about why I’m forwarding. Many people seem to just forward with text like “fyi” or no context what so ever. Bleh to that.
hairylunch: I used to have a contact page but it fell by the wayside during the recent site changes. I’ll reinstate it — thanks for reminding me. As for email etiquette, I’m actually waiting on my copy of “Send” to arrive from Amazon, to see what it’s got that’s of interest. The problem with email etiquette is not just that it’s been done to death, but that so much of it is aimed at those who haven’t been using email for long. I would *hope* that the geek readership of this blog knows not to use giant animated graphics in their sigfiles, and so forth. But yes, it’s on the list.