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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of my first job in London looking after the network of a recruitment agency. The consultants got headsets for the first time and one got so annoyed about being interrupted when on a call - because you couldn't tell when people were wearing headsets the whole time - that she taped a big bit of card to the top of her headset saying "ON A CALL" that she could flip up and down depending on whether she was speaking to someone.

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I had a coworker who felt free to interrupt me at any time. Even if I were frowning and leaning in to read some code word for word, he’d stop by to talk about nothing. I started wearing headphones when I was in concentration mode and that didn’t help. Then I wrote “DO NOT DISTURB” on a post-it note, stuck it to my headphones, and dug in for some thought-intensive hacking. He came to my desk, pulled the note off the headphones I wore, and tapped me on the shoulder, laughing. “Hah, look what someone taped to your head!”

We both learned something about the limits of my patience that day.

Got to love that productive office work for us swes.

There's always that person. The only solution is renting your own office (not even home office unless one lives alone).

Murder is always an option. If you can get one thought worker on the jury, you'd never be convicted.

Surely it would be closer to justice if one were to dispatch the various management gurus and architects who claimed open plan was acceptable and any CEO who agreed with that garbage?

Here's a new idea, will it be adopted? Well does it increase office misery - then yes. If one idea gets past that goes the other direction its removal will be the most pressing management concern. Presently the biggest trend in the c-suite is how to end remote work in the face of all its positive metrics. Hot-desking, which has nothing positive about it for anyone, get behind it!

Can one volunteer for jury duty? Asking for a friend.

... or you could have communicated your boundaries & expectations first thing and explicitly instead of doing this weird song and dance and complain on hacker news about it afterwards?

Kinda sounds like I did and they kept ignoring them. Some of us try to approach problems like grownups, even if we leave the details out when they’d break the flow of a story.

> We both learned something about the limits of my patience that day.

Let me guess: you did absolutely nothing?

I can remember people using various USB "busy lights" since way back in the Skype for Business days. And one of our super old offices has an 80s style wired green/yellow/red light indicator outside of the door, that presumably used to connect to a switch on the desk.

> And one of our super old offices has an 80s style wired green/yellow/red light indicator outside of the door, that presumably used to connect to a switch on the desk.

These light trees used to be (and probably still are in some places) used for the purpose of incident management when in operations centers like NOCs or similar. It is tied to internal status and incident management systems.

That may be but they originated in manufacturing, long before NOCs were a thing.

Andon lights!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_light

Our old Plantronics phone headsets had a TRS jack which would connect to an optional status light. It would light up when the headset was on a call.

https://www.headsetsdirect.com/product/poly-busy-light-strai...

My old company used these more recently: https://busylight.com/

I used one of those recently at home since my wife can't see my screen, she's not sure if I'm on a call, listening to music or just there. The built in software sucks, but there are some good open source options https://github.com/JnyJny/busylight also works together with https://mutedeck.com/ for supporting things like Zoom.

Man, Plantronics. That brings back some memories!

Easy fix. Call the person when tbey are on a call. If engaged tbey will be engaged. Then move that person to a house in the suburbs where their kids bappen to also live.

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