This post is a response to a blog post I found on another blog A Random Web Page from April 2004. In that blog post a person was complaining about a noisy office worker and used a Dilbert cartoon on the same subject to demonstrate the point. I found this blog because I was searching for a different Dilbert comic where that same guy decides to try chewing crushed ice to annoy people and Google found this first. On this blog I complain about everything I hate (which is most things), but I also reserve a special place in my (black, rotten) heart for ice chewing and other slurp/crunch combinations.

I had the following advice, conceived of when I thought the post was current. It's probably still good advice. Personally, in his situation, I would be up front about it. Just tell her that her eating noises are very loud and disruptive. Tell your manager that sharing an office with the sow is destroying your productivity and your happiness. Managers care about your productivity, so you or she may very will get reassigned an office. If it's not that kind of situation then use earplugs and headphones and be curt with her so she gets the point. She may be too dense to get the point; after all, she is too dense to realize for herself that her behavior is intolerably annoying.

But anyway, there is a guy who hangs out in some of the same cafes that I do that gets iced tea and the first thing he does is use a spoon to slurp up the ice and chew it. Now, to start, this guy is already a mouth-breather (although I've never seen him drag his knuckles, conversations I've overheard indicate that such behavior is probable) and so naturally he chews the ice with his mouth open. I thought it was common knowledge that chewing ice is super-annoying to everybody around the chewer and that people did it only as a compulsion, a bad habit. I saw this guy get a cup of iced tea and and then commence the ice chewing while he simultaneously began flirting with the girl sitting next to him. Clearly this poor loser does not know that ice chewing is super-annoying. I was hoping to use the Dilbert cartoon to indirectly give him the message (by talking about it with somebody else in his vicinity). I'll keep hunting.

Maybe we need to do something to publicize these problems nationally. In the past we could just have a Seinfeld episode about it, but now? Maybe on the Daily Show.