<work rant>My office is two floors, but admittedly, none of the doors are closed anywhere, and the walls are rather thin. That being said, there is a fair amount of computer noise being generated downstairs, and I hear very little of it. So the office is far from being an empty cave in which everything is heard everywhere all the time.

With that introduction comes my complaint. My boss is in today. Bossman is an “interesting” person to say the very least. In today’s complaint at issue is his use of his cell phone. Bossman rarely answers the land line phones. He sometimes makes an outgoing call from them, but even that is unusual. Bossman likes to wander around as he talks, in and out of the building, in and out of the car, wherever. Bossman thus always uses his cellphone. So far so good; cellphones have all sorts of issues, but in general I can live with people using them.

Bossman is unique even among obsessive cellphone users though. Bossman has a couple of different fears.

• Bossman has a thing about germs. The little speaker holes for the microphone, if placed close to the mouth, offer a good place for germs to grow. That aside, Bossman would probably mention that hands can be pretty germy and handle the cellphone all the time./li
• Bossman is paranoid about cellphone radiation. I can sympathize with this fear a little bit. Cellphones do put out quite a bit, and studies on the subject go both ways. Most people with this concern seem to think this a reason not to use cellphones. Bossman is not one of them though./li /ul These two fears lead to the odd reality. Bossman constantly uses his cellphone, and constantly uses the speakerphone capability of the cellphone. This is not a good, nor logical, combination. Since the speakerphone quality is poor, Bossman’s conversations tend to be stressful things, both for Bossman (who gets short tempered with people he is talking to, especially if they interrupt him (he interrupts people all the time, so sometimes it feels like interrupting him is the only way to correct a wrong impression)), and for the person he is talking to, who likely can only hear half of what is being said.

  What is that you ask? You see, Bossman likes to call from the car: with road noises, and with bridges causing momentary static and so on. Bossman likes to call from restaurants, where there is all sorts of background noise. And worst of all, Bossman loves/strong/em to call from airports; where you can hear the announcements more clearly than Bossman. And remember, Bossman is using a cellphone speakerphone. Which can only handle one/em sound a time. So if it picks up on you/em speaking, it does not transmit Bossman speaking (and vice versa). Worse, if it picks up on that background noise, it no longer sends Bossman’s attempt at communication.

  Bossman, as I said, rarely uses the land line phones. As a result, Bossman ends up calling all sorts of people, particularly customers, from his cellphone. Customers are not always the brightest of people, but they are generally capable of noticing that if they want to talk to Bossman, they will not reach him on the landlines. So they call his cellphone. So Bossman is constantly changing cellphones and phone numbers.

  But all of this, annoying as it is for me at times, is an aside today. People have heard me complain about all of this before. Today though, Bossman is wandering around downstairs, on the cellphone speaker phone, apparently working his way through some computerized menu system TIME AND TIME AGAIN/strong/em. I am not downstairs to see it, but I have no doubt what is happening. Sometimes when in the office, Bossman will place a call, put it on speakerphone, and proceed to wander around a space talking to the cellphone, but not carrying it with him/em. So undoubtedly, Bossman, who is highly distractable, is wandering too far away from the phone and missing the critical part of the menu system when he is able to make his choice.

  Additionally, for some reason, the voice of this computerized system is carrying very/strong/em well.

  </work rant>

  As an amusing aside, the cause of this cellphone call is apparently that Bossman forgot to pay his electric bill long enough that the electric company has cut him off. Apparently this is not the first time.