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.