Incredibly Rude

So today I was asked to make 25 books. That’s not so bad in itself, but it’s made worse by the fact that it was a xerox book, not a print book.

With a print book you send your copies to the color printer, put in the section separators, then bind them. It’s pretty painless and relatively easy to do.

With a xerox book, you have to make individual copies of each section and slowly put the book together as the copies come out of the xerox machine.

To make the job less painful today, I had a radio in the copyroom to keep me company. I had it tuned to a mild rock station – it plays everything from Stevie Nicks to Dido to Gwen Stefani. At one point during my marathon bookmaking session I was helping Mary with a question she had, and a partner came in to make a copy. The radio was sitting on the side section of the xerox machine. As Mare-Bear and I were talking, the partner turned down the radio all the way. I stopped in mid-sentence and just kind of stared at him for a minute.

Mare-Bear gave me a look that said, “Did he just turn down your radio?”

As the partner finished making his copy, MB and I finished our conversation and as she was leaving I said loudly, “Did my radio just turn off somehow?”

I stood there patiently near the partner as he waited for his copy to finish. Then as soon as the copier came to stop, as the partner continued to stand there, I stepped over to the radio and cranked it up again.

I just think it’s incredibly rude to walk into someone’s work area (even if it’s a public space) and mess with their stuff. If the copy room had been empty, radio blaring, I could see turning it down. But not when someone is obviously using it while working on a large project. What makes it all the more maddening is that periodically he’ll listen to his own god-awful music (i.e., really bad dance music, chinese operas, novelty songs) so loud it can be heard in the kitchen on the other side of the office.