Now that I work in a cubicle farm I find that I am again hampered by people coming in to my cube to ask questions, check on my progress, and socialize. These are the plagues of the work place... and I doubt that offices would help me much on that. Although having an office would reduce the neck cramp I get from glancing around every time someone walks by. Lately I've ben trying to ignore the people behind me until I am spoken too... but that doesn't help: My head snaps around even faster when I'm surprised to hear a voice. On the other hand I get more sleep these days. :-)

^*Absense of people was by no means equivalent to absense of noise. I often worked with the radio on or some movie playing on the tube. I especially like having HBO at the time because they played they same movies over and over again during a given week. This reduced what could have been a distraction to an interesting sort of white-noise. It had the interesting side effect of distracting friends who had come by to distract me, often buying me an hour of daytime work while my friend sat entranced by a movie I had seen 3 or 4 times in the last 3 or 4 days. But I digress.

"Lately I've ben trying to ignore the people behind me until I am spoken too..."

Oh man, that's the worst! When you get that strange feeling that someone is staring at your back, and then you say, "Is anyone in here?" (because you are too lazy to turn around), and someone says, "Oh, yes" and you respond in your snottiest voice possible, "You're still here?" and they *still* don't get the hint. BTW, I don't do this to everyone, just the senseless one's who can't pick up a hint the first time around.

redmist
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email::redmist

One way to solve the people sneaking up on you is what my Honours supervisor has, which is a convex mirror on top of his monitor so he can easily see anyone that walks into his office.

Cheers!