The Voice.... That Carries

Recently I was speaking with a group of co-workers and the topic of "noisy people" came up.  Anyone who has ever worked in an office environment with more than three people probably understands there is always that one person who is much louder than everyone else, and where I work (due to the number of people who share the space) we have more than a handful.

There are quite a few different types of noisy people ranging from the person who has no concept of their own volume when speaking a phone, to the type of person who feels a laugh needs to be at least 90 dB to be effective, to the type of person who likes to watch ESPN clips on their computer with the volume cranked.  My personal favorite however is the person who wears headphones while listening to music and doesn't realize that when they decide to talk they are now about three times louder than they need to be.  That's always a crowd pleaser especially when they decide to drop an f-bomb in a professional environment (and even worse is when you sit near them and are on a conference call with a sensitive mic).

The thing is, in this particular group of co-workers that I was speaking with, everyone pretty much mentioned the same person as being noisy, so it isn't like I'm the only one who has recognized it.  Actually, rather than mince words I'll just call her loud, because in essence that is what she is.  The best part is everyone knows she is loud.  She has been told she is loud.  People have been known to sneak up to her desk and turn up the volume on her phone in the hopes it might help to reduce her speaking volume (since in theory she would hear her own voice being fed back into the earpiece on her phone and adjust volume accordingly), but basically there isn't much that has worked. 

Now I don't want to make it seem like this is a huge annoyance or that it is disturbing, because for the most part it is just one of those things you deal with in life.  Some people are loud, some are quiet just as some people are friendly and some are bitter at everyone and everything around them.  Whether someone is loud or not just isn't that big of a deal because it is fairly easy to tune them out if you aren't directly engaged in a conversation with them, and frankly this particular person is friendly and outgoing and the type of person who I am happy to have as a colleague, so the fact she is a tad louder than those around her is a relatively minor point.

The interesting thing about this particular woman however is that she knows and acknowledges that she is loud and that her voice is typically at a volume level in excess of what is considered normal.  This is where I tend to hear the oh-so-common excuse when the conversation of loud people comes up where she openly stated she is loud because she has "one of those voices that carry so well".  Really?  You just magically have a voice that carries better than the voices of other human beings?  I find that interesting.

There is a lot of science behind sound and I don't want to get off on a tangent here, but basically a sound wave is comprised of characteristics such as the frequency (the pitch of the sound itself), amplitude (think of that as volume), wavelength (which is inversely proportional to frequency), intensity, and pressure.  Now although it is true that different frequencies of sound are detected by the human ear at various volume levels (the human ear does not have a flat spectral response), for the most part the difference between volume levels within the frequency range of human speech is not all that significant.

This is a long way of saying that person A's voice does not differ dramatically from person B's voice when looked at in terms of a sound wave.  There is no physics magic that allow the sound waves of one person to travel farther than the other given the same volume level and (approximate) frequency, and for all intents and purposes a voice is a voice in terms of how far it can go.  There may be differences on who can hear that voice of course, but as a whole that isn't really an issue when speaking about a group who is all listening to the same person unless they were all hard of hearing or if they all had better-than-average hearing (which I somehow doubt is the case in my example).

So when someone says they have a voice that travels so well or a voice that carries so well... they are basically just repeating something they heard once with no understanding of how silly they actually sound (no pun intended).  The fact is, for all intents and purposes if someone has a voice that "carries well" it is likely due to the fact that they talk louder than everyone around them.  Thus a distance X, person A with amplitude Y they will obviously be heard better than person B with amplitude Z assuming a comparable frequency and Y being greater than Z.

So yea... sometimes a loud person is just a loud person, and an excuse is just an excuse.  Chances are if someone has a voice that carries better than those around them... it has less to do with physics and a whole lot more to do with them just being loud (and in some cases annoying as well).

The more you know.

Stupid People: The “I Fail To Learn My Lesson” Person

A mechanic I know told me a story about a woman who came in to have her passenger side mirror replaced on her car. The thing was… it wasn’t the first time. This woman had the same mirror replaced four or five times on a car she had owned for only a couple of years because she would continually break it off while backing out of her garage.

Now I can accept someone breaking off a mirror… I even did something similar once myself while trying to squeeze around a car parked in the middle of the driveway. I might even be able to accept someone doing it twice when they failed to learn the lesson the first time or maybe were driving a different vehicle. However, if you break off the same mirror four or five times in a span of two years, how smart could you possibly be? How many times do you actually need to do something stupid before you stop and ask yourself how you can prevent from it happening again?

Since hearing this story I often have wondered what someone like that does for a living. What if she was a doctor or a dentist or worse – a politician. I’m not sure stupidity is isolated to only one area of the brain, so needless to say if this was my doctor I’d be finding myself a new doctor, and if this was my politician… I’d probably move to a new district as I would be embarrassed to be represented by an idiot.

I also see stupid people who get married and divorced time and time again. You see celebrities who have been married seven or eight times and they end up divorced over and over again. Don’t you think that after your fourth or fifth failed marriage you might stop to think – hey maybe this whole marriage thing isn’t for me because I clearly suck at it? Sure you can blame a few marriages on the other person, but when you are filing for your seventh divorce I think it is safe to say you haven’t learned your lesson and likely never will.

I fully realize we all do stupid things, but most of us learn from our mistakes and hopefully do our best to prevent making those same mistakes time and time again. However the more and more I look around me, the more and more stupid people I see. This is precisely why tax preparation companies are so popular during tax season, because if a person can’t manage to back out of their garage without breaking off their mirror time and time again, or if they can’t manage to have a successful marriage after six or seven attempts, they aren’t very likely to be able to fill out a tax return even if they only need the 1040EZ form.

You often hear people say that people are smart but they just do stupid things. I have to say I totally disagree with that. There was a Seinfeld episode where Jerry asked Elaine what percentage of people she thought were good looking and she answered twenty-five percent. Jerry then said “Twenty-five percent, you say? No way! It's like 4 to 6 percent. It's a twenty to one shot.”

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say 4 to 6 percent is the magic number, but there is no way I would claim that more than 20% of the human race is considered smart. I’m not even going so far as to say you have to hold a PhD or understand advanced level thermodynamics or quantum theory here… I’m merely talking about the amount of people who don’t do or say stupid things on a regular basis.

I hate to sound negative, but I’d estimate 80% of our population is comprised of stupid people, which probably explains the popularity of things like the Snuggie, vaccine-causing-autism conspiracy theories, Jersey Shore, and the belief that there really is such a thing as Bigfoot.

Stupid People: The “I Can’t Grasp The Concept Of Volume” Person (Volume 5)

This will likely be the last in my series of “volume related” stupid people stories although I’m sure I could easily write another dozen or so if I was up to it. This last episode is one of my personal favorites and sticks in my memory like it happened yesterday. I’ve told this story to several people over the years, and for some reason even after almost 20 years since it actually occurred, I still find it rather comical.

I was working in the back room of ShopKo stocking shelves and doing whatever it is I normally did in the course of my shift when I received a page for a delivery (yes we carried pagers… needless to say this was the 90s). I called up to the register and was told a gentleman had just purchased a swing set and needed it carried out.

Now normally we would have the person drive around back and we would load the swing set there, but that required a manager to unlock the rear door and at the time none of them were in the immediate area. Rather than chase one of them down and waste the customer’s time, I decided to just grab another fellow employee and have him help me get it loaded onto two carts.

Keep in mind the largest swing sets came in boxes that were about 10 feet long, two feet wide, and 12-18 inches tall or so. I don’t remember the weight, but we generally would not even try to handle them alone. So in this case we placed a rolling flatbed under each end and proceeded to drive it to the front of the store as if it was one of those hook and ladder (fire) trucks you see with a guy on the front and the back both steering.

When we met the customer the first question out of my mouth even before bothering to haul this thing any further was to ask him what type of vehicle he drove. He immediately understood what I was getting at once he saw the size of the box, and he told me he drove a full size van, so it would not be a problem fitting it inside. Admittedly I was very relieved to hear this, so we followed him out the door and to his van.

When I saw the van I was extremely happy. Not only was this a full size van, but it was one of those extended vans with two full doors on the back to make access extremely easy. However, as soon as he opened the doors I saw a problem. The van was full of bench seats because it wasn’t really a cargo van – it was a 14 passenger van… and the seats did not fold down nor were they removable (without tools at least). The swing set was too large to fit under the seats, so our options were somewhat limited.

No problem – the customer just told us to lay it across the top of the seats and he would haul it that way. I knew it would fit so that wasn’t the issue, but I wasn’t sure the seats would appreciate having a heavy swing set laid on top of them and even worse I knew if he had to stop suddenly this could be a huge safety issue.

Long story short the guy just didn’t care. He was willing to take the risk and I knew I wasn’t liable if anything happened, so we proceeded to lift the swing set onto the seats, slide it forward and shut the rear doors. The front of the box was right between the two head rests of the front seat so at least if he had to slam on his brakes it would crush the dash and/or windshield rather than his skull, but I still thought it was a pretty stupid idea.

However, it was about that time that I turned around and noticed a woman with what appeared to be at least seven or eight kids standing there staring at us. Apparently this woman was his wife, and these were his kids. They were shopping alone which is why they weren’t around while we were loading this whole thing.

Now keep in mind this swing set rested on top of the seats so although a kid could lay on the seat or hunch over, there was no way possible to actually sit up straight in the middle of each row, and those who did sit up straight on the sides were risking head injury each time the van would turn a corner and the swing set would inevitably slide along the top of the seats (because it goes without saying the guy wasn’t interested in fastening this thing down).

As the woman opened the side doors, these kids proceeded to pile in the van one by one… each of them bending their heads in what would appear to be a very uncomfortable position in order to fit around and under the swing set.

Now if this guy was merely driving across town this might not be such an interesting story, but after seeing his contorted kids wedge themselves around the swing set I just had to ask where they were headed. The guy told me where he lived but I wasn’t aware of the town (and have long since forgot what it was called), but I do remember him saying it was about a two hour drive.

Not only was this guy going to be driving at highway speeds with a huge cardboard encased steel projectile capable of decapitation, but he was going to do so with his tribe of children wedged and squeezed around it just for good measure… for two hours.

Without so much as a shred of concern for the comfort or safety of his family, he pulled away as I stood there with mental images of a horrific traffic accident with random children impaled upon swing set parts and a rescue worker wondering who would ever be stupid enough to load a swing set on to the tops of the seats of a fully loaded passenger van.

Once again – people are stupid, and in this case I was probably an accessory to the stupidity.

Dadelions

I think the flower companies decided that dandelions were a weed instead of a flower just because they can grow anywhere, they look pretty good, and they are free…just think of what that would have done to their business if they were officially called a flower.

Truth be told, if you squint just a tad when looking at a field of dandelions, can you really tell them apart from daisies?  I think not.  Plus they are self-propagating, require next to zero water, grow in even the worst possible conditions, and in a pinch you can even make wine out of them.

Of course society has taught us they are weeds, and my neighbors probably would be rather upset with me if I didn't spray for them or control them... so I guess I'm stuck.  Life is so unfair... if you're a dandelion that is.

Stupid People: The “I Can’t Grasp The Concept Of Volume” Person (Volume 4)

Here we go again – another example of someone who has no grasp on the concept of volume. A liter, gallon, square foot, acre, hectare, or quart… it might as well be all the same to these idiots. I get the distinct impression these were the people who as children spent entire afternoons trying to wedge the round peg into the square hole, and never once did it occur to them that they should try something else.

Then again, if the parents realized they have a stupid kid at such an early age, maybe they just gave up and realized anything that keeps the kid occupied for an afternoon isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In any case this brings us to the case of the idiot who didn’t think they needed to see out of their passenger window or that there would ever be a need to use all the gears in their transmission. You see often times when I would attempt to load a boxed piece of furniture, the only way to fit it into the vehicle and still allow more than just the driver to fit in the vehicle (or in the case of a hatchback actually close the hatch) was to turn the box on its side and place it between the two front seats resting upon the center console.

Personally I didn’t recommend this for a few different reasons of which I will outline here:

First, the weight of some of the boxed furniture was actually quite heavy, and it could easily damage the console. Granted for the typical owner who suggested this, they probably didn’t care all that much about the console on their 1982 Honda Civic hatchback.

Second, if the driver ever had to see out the passenger side window, sometimes the box was tall enough that it made this nearly impossible… not exactly the safest plan in the book. Any attempt to explain this to the driver/owner was typically meant with the “I’m not going very far” retort, as if that really makes a significant difference.

Third, in the event of sudden acceleration, the weight of the furniture could shift backwards and crack or explode the rear window. That probably isn’t a huge issue with the massive power in a 1982 Honda Civic… but you never know.

Fourth, in the event the driver was forced to make an abrupt stop, the weight of the box would shift forward and either crash into the dash and console, or even worse smash into the shifter between the seats and knock the vehicle out of gear (or into a different gear altogether).

It is this fourth scenario that actually was fairly common, and I can recall a few such incidents where this was actually an issue. The first involved a customer who after loading the furniture realized he would only be able to use 1st, 3rd, and 5th gears of the transmission because 2nd, 4th, and Reverse couldn’t engage due to the placement of the box. Aside from the fact that his wrist and arm would need to contort to even make the most basic gear changes, and aside from the fact that he was missing several rather important gears, this particular customer didn’t really seem all that concerned and went along his way.

Another incident involved a woman which found she was unable to move her gear selector out of the park position when the box was completely in her vehicle. The only logical solution would be to open the hatch of her car and allow the box to protrude a foot or so out the back. Then you either leave the hatch open and take your chances, or you tie it down and take your chances. Depending upon weather, an open hatch isn’t always an option which leads us to our stupid incident.

This woman actually asked me to lift up on the box just long enough for her to shift the car into drive so she could get home. So here we have a situation where every time she would apply the brakes on the way home there was a good chance the car would shift into neutral, which would force her to push the box back towards the rear and/or attempt to pull the gear selector back into drive. This is also a situation where a fairly substantial amount of weight is resting on a gear selector which was never designed to hold a weight load at all.

I’d love to tell you how the story ends, but once she was in drive and on her way… frankly I just didn’t care. If she made it home in once piece with no damage to her vehicle that is great, but if I were a betting man I would guess there were a few choice words said at least once during her trip home. Once again, stupidity seemed to serve as its own punishment, and this woman will get what she deserves.