today it dawned on me that i may be a loud person.

the walls in my office are rather thin. my department is set up of three offices all connected with each other. typically, we leave the doors open so be better able to yell communicate. so when today i got a call from it telling me to shut down a certain program and ask my colleagues to do the same i yelled in their general direction to close the program. 10 minutes later i got the “ok” phone call and yelled again that they can open up the program again.

we always do that. no one ever complained.

in addition, my phone rang off the hook today as three colleagues had their phone lines rerouted to my phone. so basically, whenever i wasn’t on the phone i was running to answer it. annoying! i highly dislike this phone stress. don’t get me wrong, i understand that receiving phone calls is part of any job but having four lines to answer (i work in marketing) is just nuts.

so eventually that phone marathon just made me yell something (no profanities, just something out of frustration). and yell again. over lunch a colleague asked me what was going on in our office. i wasn’t sure what she meant and then she said that we’re normally loud but today was even worse.

oh-oh….collegiality-fail!

with that in mind i tried to watch my noise level over the next hours and caught myself several times attempting to yell/moan loudly/complain to myself/cuss and curse life in general.

so yes, i may be a loud person. i apologize. i’ll try to shut up or turn down the volume. i’m german and germans like their co-workers to like them.

franzi