Feedback

I’m at work, sitting at my desk with my headphones on. I wear my headphones to drown out the background noise in the office. “The office” is filled with cubicles. With so many people doing their everyday things and having their normal conversations, sometimes it can get loud and distracting. Then again, sometimes I just like to listen to the music.

At any rate, I am jamming (more like JAMMIN’) to contemporary Christian music and being quite productive. The day is flying by. I completely expect to complete everything I planned to accomplish today…and that’s really saying something. I’m working on a pretty big project right now…big for me anyway. And I find myself overwhelmed by what is still left to do. Our deadline is the end of March, which is still nine weeks away. So, I’m hopeful that by just being acutely aware of that looming target, we’ll stay on course and be able to present the completed project to the customer on time. But none of that is why I had to stop and type up this little rant.

While the music is playing in my ears, I hear nothing besides music and the tapping of my keystrokes. But between songs, I was hearing this strange squawking sound. At first, I thought it was just the CD that I was listening to. But eventually I realized that it was feedback between a couple of the electronic devices I have on my desk. I’m still not sure which two. But now my personal cell phone is in my jeans pocket. My work BlackBerry is on the left side of my PC, while my desk phone is on the right side of my PC. And the PDA/Scanner that I’m working with is stretched as far away from my PC as possible.

I’m not sure why I didn’t have this strange feedback issue before. And I’m not sure why these devices chose today to not play nicely with each other. But I’ve adequately separated them to various corners of my cubicle. I think I can get back to being productive again.