Overhearing people have private telephone arguments with their partners at work

(Unsettling phenomena of office life)



NEILL says:

There are many shitty things about working in an office, from well-known classics such as 'Having to spend every day wearing a fucking suit doing work you have no vested personal or creative interest in, surrounded by people you would never freely choose to associate with because they're boring and irritating and probably smell', to more alternative numbers such as 'Feeling oddly self-conscious if not actually guilty every time you have to walk across the office to go to the toilet'. A less recognised but equally shitty thing is 'Overhearing people have private telephone arguments with their partners at work'. There's something incredibly unsettling about sitting there listening to someone you work with hissing bitterly down the phone to their Husband / Girlfriend / Lesbian Life-Partner about whose turn it is to cook dinner, or who failed to get the forms in to the estate agent in time, or whatever exactly it is that married people seem to spend so much of their lives being bitter and angry about. It is the incongruity that is jarring; people who may be the most unfailingly professional and imperturbably faux-affable beings on the planet apparently think nothing of laying bare their true natures to anyone within listening distance when they're making a personal call. The results range from hilarious to genuinely terrifying. I think what I find so uncomfortable about the phenomena is that is a window into the infinite tiny banalities, spites and hurts that make up people's real lives. Now, if there's one thing I can't abide, it's windows into the infinite tiny banalities, spites and hurts that make up people's real lives. That kind of thing just burns my nads. Why the hell do you think I stopped watching Eastenders?

Keep it down, people.

4/10