House Rules

[waider]

My roomie has absolutely no respect for my TV-viewing habits. In particular, I just sat down to enjoy the bonus material on the Dogma Special Edition CD, which contains, you know, talking so you have to pay attention to it. And roomie came in from wherever and started talking. Just launched straight into telling me how she'd brought her radio home from work and she was going to throw out the old one and and and and I turned off the DVD and gave up on it. She does this enough that it's annoying, but I feel stupid complaining about it, and on the whole I get on well enough with her. But still.

Comments

[nothings.livejournal.com]

Maybe this is different because you couldn't hear the DVD over her, but I have the habit sometimes if I'm working intensely of totally not hearing people talking to me. They start talking, apparently assume I'm listening despite the fact that I'm typing and staring at the monitor, and keep talking. It's like they assume that of course a human is more important than a computer so if they start talking I will automatically start listening. Often after a while I will say, "Sorry, I wasn't listening, what was that?"

But when I'm at my mother's house for Christmas and I'm doing some programming on the laptop or reading a book, sometimes my brother will talk to me and I'm not really interested in talking to him, so not only will he not notice that I'm not listening, but I will eventually simply say, "I'm trying to program/read, I'm not listening to you."

I assume this is more off-putting than you are willing to do with your roommate.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Short answer: yes. I'm a very not-rock-the-boat person, and generally, as I've mentioned, I get on well with roomie.

I do the stare at my screen thing in the office, too, but I'm not so good at blocking people out. If they start talking, I'll generally tell 'em sharply to wait until I'm good and ready to deal with them, and then go back to whatever I'm doing. It's not such a big deal as a sysadmin, though, since I tend to be involved in short-term tasks most of the time and long-term state-maintenance as required for programming isn't an issue.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

Despite how wonderful it might sound, I'm not sure being "good at blocking them out" is itself a good thing. It's not a conscious choice on my part to ignore them--it's a "eventually I realize that they were talking to me and I missed everything they said". I suppose if the building were on fire I might notice the different tone of voice and react to it... but I'm not sure.

The guy I sublet office space from was going out for an hour or two and asked if someone would answer the phone for him, and I volunteered. Both times the phone rang while he was gone, another guy who was visiting had to say "Are you going to get that or not" before I became aware it was ringing. (I *heard* it ringing but wasn't aware of it, so as soon as they said something I could even remember how many times it had rung so far.)