After two and a half week at the new job, I have observed a few funny things:

Since I work at the sales department, everybody has contact with customers or prospective customers at least daily, and many of my colleagues do nothing but talk on the phone. Now, people who talk a lot on the phone invest in a hands-free that allows them to work on the computer while talking. They also use cell phones for portability, which means that they wear their hands-free:s all day long.
Now, what’s funny is that they talk while walking around in the office, meaning that you can meet them and it will look like they are talking to themselves. The funniest thing, though, happened yesterday.

I walked through the office and saw two of my colleagues sitting at a desk facing each other and talking. I overheard a little of their conversation, and it sounded so silly that I had to stop and look again. I then realized that each of them talked to a customer with their hands-free via the cell phones in their pockets. Even though they were sitting next to each other and even though it seemed they had some kind of meeting, they had nothing to do with each other.

One thing not so funny is the constant phone ringing. Several times an hour, you hear the specific phonecall of a specific colleague, and they never respond immediately, but prefer to wait a few seconds and check who’s calling. Add this to the fact that most of them have new phones with polyphonic/mp3 ringing tones and that everyone seems to choose the strangest signal they can, it makes the noises in the office quite singular.

This is the reason why I wrote my MPD/Icecast howto and implemented it as quickly as I could, so I could listen to music and not have to be disturbed by the phones no more.

(currently listening to Earth, Wind & Fire)