Buehler and I share an office, okay? It's not a huge office. It's big enough for the two of us because he travels a lot.

The point is that when someone walks to the door and sees that one of us is on the phone, what drives them to start hearty, loud-voiced conversations with the other one? Are they under the impression that someone sitting eight feet away is magically protected from the painful echoes of their voice bouncing off two glass walls?

I have no object to the quiet hello. Speaking in a reasonable tone of voice is perfectly acceptable. We can't each be expected to stop working just because the other is on the phone. But a little consideration, is that too much to ask? Maybe it is. The art of lowering one's voice discreetly when necessary seem to be a lost one.

Bossyboots does it. The Tweenybopper does it. And now the new guy, Stretch, he's doing it. He walked to the door. Buehler is on the phone. I'm looking at my computer, typing. "Good morning!" he booms.

Pisses me off. Pisses me off that I'm always having to shush people and they treat me like I'm being rude.

Yesterday I got up and left at 4:15. It was that ghastly of a day.

Today I came in at 8:00 and by 8:12 I was already kind of sorry. Wednesday, as I did a demo of the latest release of the software for a potential user, I ran into multiple bugs. I complained, they fixed them, and they introduced a lot of additional bugs. Since we have a Major Presentation today to, among others, the people paying us to develop and roll out this software, a certain amount of chaos ensued. That's what went wrong with yesterday, BTW. This morning when I got here, my e-mail just kept loading mail sent yesterday evening...last night...early this morning.

I like to think of developers working all night to fix the stuff they shouldn't have let get past them in the first place, okay?

I'm going to get some coffee. And there had better be at least one piece of pumpkin bread left at Starbucks or someone is going to get hurt.

(Note: The first sip tasted like Mulderanskinner again. So interesting.)