I received a call from an acquaintance the other day. I hadn’t heard from this person in years but he started off the conversation seemingly ranting about all the noise he had to put up with at his workplace. He works in the same field as I once did, but for a competitor. I said that he should send off a copy of item #8 from the Joel Test [1] to his boss. If that doesn’t do the trick then he should bypass his boss and send it straight up the chain to the next guy. He kept rambling. This is the story he told.

“I like weekends but I miss the sounds that emanate from the lobby and my cubicle farm.

I work in a cubicle farm on the second floor above the lobby. The space above the lobby is open and all the sound is very acoustically bounced off the lobby’s marble floor and the 2-story glass entry up to the cubicle farm on the second floor. You can hear every conversation that takes place in the lobby. I’m almost ready to bring a decibel meter in for some testing because I believe that the sounds that emanate from the lobby actually gain amplitude as the sound-waves make their way to their destination they bounce off the marble and glass to the second floor. The phone rings constantly. Our well-thought-out system of phone etiquette is to greet the caller and ask how we can help them. Well, most callers just want to be transferred to their boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, drinking buddies or parents. Sure, there are some callers that would like to gather some information regarding the job they gave to us. They ask for the person that sold them our service but after about 30-60 seconds of waiting on hold as that person is paged over the intercom system ,barely audible, but loud sound system that is mounted sporadically throughout the 20-foot high rafters around the building they are once again asked who they would like to be connected to. Usually on the second round it is suggested that the original person doesn’t appear to be responding to audible pages or rings of the phone at their desk so they should probably seek out the assistant of the person they sought. This substitute person is probably the person who they should be speaking to anyhow. The second person in the phone system tier is a Customer Service Representative. Well, these are often very busy people running around paging Production Managers, Salespersons and Purchasing personnel. Often, they require a second page. This is the third round of paging that the person who called in to our phone system must wait for. At this point it’s known that it is time to end the call. Either the second person, the first person’s assistant picks up the call or the caller is put into their choice of the first or second person’s voice-mail. All of this sound is bouncing off the marble floor and two-story glass window that lines the lobby, growing in amplitude, gaining decibels as it makes its way up to the cubicle farm on the second floor. All this sound from the lobby below.

I interrupt my acquaintance to tell him that my crappy cell-phone battery is about to die ( I was getting impatient) so he had better hurry and get to the point or he’ll be disconnected. He goes on again, not realizing that I have a fairly new phone that gives hours of talk-time before the battery expends it’s energy-

The lobby is just the beginning. There are noises spawning from the cubicle farm. In one cubicle there is an employee that insists that “This phone has a speaker in it for my convenience!” He starts every call with the speaker-phone enabled. First is the dial-tone. Those two frequencies, 350 Hz and 440 Hz pummeling the little speaker in the base of the phone as he dials the extension of his assistant, number two. Often, it takes twenty or thirty seconds for the speaker-phone tweaker to finally pickup the headset and continue the conversation with his assistant as a person-to-person call instead of the person to cubicle farm call he insisted on in the beginning. Loud menacing noises still continue to emanate from this cubicle in our farm. The cubicle occupant carries on a conversation first with an employee or two, screaming and screeching loudly, whining and sobbing and nagging and complaining. Then another call comes in from the lobby below. “Mister Green, you have a call on line twelve. Mister Green, call on line twelve. Excuse me, Mr. Green, your call is actually on line three.” Mister Green picks up the call, on speaker for the first twenty seconds, of course. “Oh my god” he says. “Oooh. My God. You don’t say. Oh MYYY GOD! “ Then there is finally a moment of silence in the cubicle farm that lasts about thirty seconds. Is our call recipient still there. Maybe he had a stroke or heart attack. “OH MY GOD” yells Mister Green. He’s alive but I think I just had a heart attack. Suddenly, there is a shift in this maddening reality. My phone is ringing. I am tempted to press the speaker-phone button to give my cubicle farm neighbor a taste of his own medicine. Before I could think it through, out of habit, I pick up the handset. “Hey.” Yea? I asked. “What are you working on?” I want to respond that I’m working on trying to muffle out all the noise out here but I respond with – “Oh, I’m working on solving the company’s prime number theorem problems. Remember, nobody here knows what prime number are the best prime numbers.” I went on a bit describing the algorithms we must put into place to ensure that we extract and use only the best of the prime numbers available to us. “Oh. Ok. Be sure to get those primal number completed on schedule” the caller responded. I hung up the phone and remembered… Oh. I designing the schema of a database for a new tool I was creating.

So, what do you think I should do?” I think my cell phone batteries really were about to die. This acquaintance had been talking, seemingly forever and much time had passed so I decided that it was time to end the call. “Hey, at least you have a job. Be glad you get a paycheck. Send that Joel Test #8 to your boss and hope for the best. Catch ya later.” “Later.”

The moral of this story? None. Go check out the Joel Test.