The Drone of the Speakerphone

My coworker constantly uses his speakerphone to check his voicemail and make calls, and it's driving me nuts. Where's the line?

What you’re dealing with here is a “funzanoon,” a guy who farts in the bathtub and bites the bubbles (see: Caddyshack II).

The thing about a funzanoon is he thinks he’s so charming and interesting that his every phone conversation is worth broadcasting to the world, just as his own gas bubbles are worth savoring. The big problem for you is that he’ll never understand that he’s a funzanoon.

You’ve probably already considered or even tried the “eye for an eye” approach, but this guy is so engrossed in himself that he probably won’t notice or care if you’re on the other side of the cubicle wall barking into your own speakerphone. This is a problem that must be dealt with directly, mano-a-mano.

Before you confront this guy, make sure you know what you’re going to say and, more importantly, what he’s going to say. The funzanoon is probably full of excuses about how using a speakerphone allows him to multitask and be more productive and blah, blah, blah. In your complaint, acknowledge and refute his counterarguments before he even has a chance to make them. Be polite but be solid. Address the issue as a personal courtesy. Look him squarely in the eye.

I’m assuming that you sit close to this person, so use that proximity to your advantage. If he starts with the speakerbabble again, give him a look that will let him know he’s disrupting your work. If he persists, have the conversation again.

Involving your boss is a last resort, because a boss will have to mediate the problem on an office-wide scale, which means a memo on when it is and isn’t appropriate to use a speakerphone. But rules are always open to interpretation, and you don’t want to get into a semantic debate with a funzanoon.

Keep the discussion on the level of professional courtesy, and you’ll have the best chance to make the problem go away.

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