Shut up, shut up… SHUT UP!

I’ve grown very rapidly weary of interruptions both intentional and unintended.

There are days when the world could be crumbling, falling down on all sides of me and I’d never notice it.  Then there are days like today.  Every whisper, giggle and laugh sets my nerves on edge and it seems as though everyone wants me to stop what I’m doing to do something else.  Inevitably they fail to realize that the something that is being stopped was originally set into motion by them.

There are times when mere secondary focus isn’t near enough for the task at hand, and full and undivided attention is required.  It is those times when someone nearby will start to talk out loud in a strong voice, asking themselves questions in order to work a problem out.  You being the conscientious person that you are, tear off a bit of your brain to listen to them and even offer a response only to realize three things: 1) They weren’t specifically asking you a question, 2) They don’t want your answer anyway and promptly ignore you — advice you should have given yourself and 3) Your focus is now totally blown to hell.

There are other times when you might be reading something exceedingly technical with the sincere intention of absorbing the contents.  Almost predictably you are peppered with questions, easily answered or ferreted out by the person asking them.  The questions are fired off every minute or so… just enough time for you to turn your attention back to what you’re doing, start to return to the groove and be distracted again.

This is also the perfect time for someone to initiate phone calls on their exceedingly loud speakerphone, lavishing upon you the obnoxious dial tone generation and ringing of the phone on the opposite end of the call.  Only after the other party has answered the phone do they pick up the handset and resume a conversation in a moderately normal tone of voice (and this is only after you have been used as an go-between by the two people who are now in a direct phone call… when you had nothing to do with either of the conversations to begin with).

Now, I say a moderately normal tone because some people in this world have never grasped the concept that phones, both analog and cellular, have progressed marvelously beyond the two-tin-cans-and-a-length-of-string phase they were in decades ago.  This results in a bellowed conversation and a ruptured eardrum on the other side of the phone.  There is one person I call on a regular basis who insists on shouting my name by way of greeting at the beginning of every call.  He winds up the first letter of my name like the charging of a Ghostbuster proton pack and proceeds to shoot me in the ear with it like Egon going after an ectoplasmic nasty.  I have since learned to hold the handset away from my head at the beginning of any call.  As a measure of contrast, Fiddy is the only person I know who can have a cell phone conversation so quiet that you never hear so much as a whisper… while he’s sitting right next to you.

Back to the topic of speakerphones.  I loathe them.  They are the single most abused feature of any phone.  If there is a necessity to have your hands free — let’s say, while delivering a baby, performing heart surgery or if there is a group of folks on one or both sides of the connection to be addressed — dandy.  Use the speakerphone.  If you’re just being a lazy fuck, then pick up the goddamned handset.  It’s an outright insult to me to if you sit on the other side of a phone call and shout to me because you can’t be bothered to pick up the fucking receiver.  Convenience is one thing, common courtesy is another entirely.

If you have something of importance that requires my attention, opinion or expertise, by all means interrupt me and get me involved.  If you are just asking me things to save yourself a minute or two of hunting around, kindly spend two seconds and see if I’m in the middle of anything important that has my rapt attention before poking me in the brain.  If you’re just being lazy and don’t feel like figuring out something insanely simple on your own, kindly write your request down neatly, fold it carefully four times and jam it forcefully into your rectum.

This has been a public service announcement.