Why It’s Very Front-Page to Gossip Constantly

(Title courtesy of my wonderful thesaurus, which claims "front-page" is a synonym for "important," which I used a few titles ago.)

As mentioned, I’m hating Emily’s ex-cube for various reasons: it lacks privacy, it’s dark and chilly until 3:30 in the afternoon due to its western exposure, and, most of all, it is near the cube of someone who makes noise nonstop, including the particular noise that makes every nerve in my body twitch unpleasantly, which is eating noise, and we’ll leave it at that.

Now, how can you possibly—oh, I guess we won’t leave it at that—tell someone their slurping and tooth-sucking is driving you crazy? Emily Post would say there is in fact no way to do this, but I did actually try it, to no avail, and now it’s even worse because there’s the irritation of the sound itself, plus every single occurrence strikes me as an act of blatant disrespect—of naked defiance.

So, just weeks after sending my boss a million emails about cubicles, I’ve sent her several more begging to return to my previous cube. To recap, the previous cube was not being paid for by my group and the Cube Organizer Lady had said I would have to move out of it when the people who are paying for it want it back, but also said it would be fine if I wanted to sit there until then.

When Emily left, my taking her cube seemed like a tidy solution. Since it has turned out not to be so, it seemed to me I could just slide back into that old cube until we hear from the Cube Organizer Lady again, but my boss has asked for official permission, so we’ll see. (I came very close to just going back there without saying anything to my boss—I have buddies in the phone-number-switching department—but it would have been discovered sooner or later and caused an element of mistrust to slip into the boss-employee relationship.)

I visit my old cube every day to keep my spirits up and interrupt my old neighbor’s work so it will seem like the norm when I start doing it again every day, as is my fondest wish. Now, when Emily vacated her cube, my old neighbor’s team lead said he thought Emily’s cube would be a nice place for my old neighbor, as it is near the rest of her group.

So yesterday I said to my old neighbor something about how maybe she would like to sit in Emily’s cube, and she got almost angry: “Why would you think I would want that cube?”

“Why would you not?”

“For the same reasons you don’t like it!”

Now, she put in her time sitting near the guy who makes all the noise, but when I was getting ready to move over near him, not once did she say, “Oh, boy, you’re not going to enjoy sitting there.” And when I’ve visited in the past couple of weeks and said, “So-and-so is driving me crazy,” not once has she replied, “Yep, I know what you mean and I’m delighted to be away from him.”

Therefore I had no idea these sentiments extended beyond myself. I may gossip too much, but that right there is an example of way too little gossip.

I must now put in a plug for the Digital Zen Alarm Clock. My former alarm clock probably cost $10 twenty years ago and has served faithfully the whole time. Once, in a tantrum in my more volatile twenties, I tried to break it and couldn’t. Over the years, though, it has become more and more jarring to be awakened by its loud buzzing, so I started doing some research on other kinds of alarm clocks.

They have progressive auditory alarm clocks these days, whose alarms start out soft and get louder, but what I ended up with was the Digital Zen Alarm Clock, which costs about $100, which is kind of embarrassing, considering that more and more people are going hungry every day in other parts of the world; even here some rice purchases are currently limited. (Are we in the beginning of the end times?)

When the clock arrived, the first thing I noticed was that the cover was crooked. Inside, I saw a scuffed chime, long and skinny, atop a cheesy expanse of black plastic styled to look like wood. It looks like “wood.” The way it works is that a striker pops up through a little hole and hits the chime, so it’s an actual acoustic sound heard just once at the time you set it for, and then there is silence for three minutes and forty-eight seconds, during which you can finish your dream or say your affirmations or whatever.

The chime sounds again and then there is silence for two minutes and twenty-one seconds. The period between chimes gets shorter and shorter until it is sounding about every five seconds. It won’t do that forever, but I’m always entirely awake and feeling not at all groggy by the time it gets to the five-second interval, whereas I could and often did hit the snooze button on my old alarm clock every nine minutes until five in the afternoon!

Maybe it’s the placebo effect, but this thing is working exactly as advertised. The other day, I was actually able to finish my dream—about being fatally attracted to a completely unsuitable man, just as in real life—between the first and second chimes.

I was debating whether or not to return the clock for one whose craftsperson was experiencing more mindfulness. It seemed kind of wasteful, but in the end, I did exchange it, and was glad I did.