It’s All Greek To Me… And SO LOUD
Back in the mid-1980s, I worked for a company that provided drug stores with all of their merchandise (pharmaceuticals, candy, pantyhose, you name it). Store representatives would call in their orders to an actual human during regular business hours, and that human would enter everything on a computer. After hours, the reps would call a device similar to an answering machine to leave their orders. I worked the 2:00 pm to 10:00 pm shift, which meant that I took “live” orders until 5:00, and then I’d put on headphones, play the recorded orders, and enter them on the computer.
Because my shift extended into the evening, the building’s cleaners would be there doing their jobs while I was doing mine. This was sometimes a little challenging if they were vacuuming close to me, since the noise of the vacuum would make it difficult to hear the voices on the tape. They were usually done and in another part of the office within minutes, though, so no big deal…
…until the old cleaners were let go for some reason, and a new set was hired. There were three of them: a man and a woman in their late forties and a younger woman, all of them Greek. I believe they were a family, but I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that their method of communicating with each other was to scream constantly at the top of their lungs in Greek, even if there were no vacuums making any noise.
This caused two problems for me:
- I couldn’t hear the orders on the answering machine due to all the shrieking. It didn’t matter how many times I replayed the tape, or how much I cranked the volume; I literally couldn’t hear.
- I grew up in a household in which my parents were constantly fighting. To this day, the sound of upraised voices (even if they’re not angry) makes me cringe and want to curl up in a fetal position. The cleaners could have been discussing something benign like, “WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR DINNER?” and, “I DON’T KNOW, HOW ABOUT PIZZA?”, but because I don’t speak Greek, all I heard was yelling. It stressed me out horribly.
I finally couldn’t take it anymore and asked them to please stop shouting at each other so much. They looked surprised — as though they’d had no idea that it would bother me — but they said they would. Well, that lasted for maybe a week, then they were back to breaking the sound barrier. I asked them to turn it down again, they promised to do so, it didn’t last, rinse, repeat.
I probably should have reported them to my supervisor, since they were hindering my ability to do my job. I didn’t because I was very unwilling to get into confrontations back then, and I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.
About a month later, they were fired. Why, I’m not sure, but they blamed me just the same. On their last day, the younger woman approached me and said sarcastically, “Sorry we were so loud!”
Well, I’m sorry they lost their jobs, but boy, the peace after they left was heavenly.
