I share a small office with a young Turk, with whom I get on well enough. He is ambitious and hardworking – already on the same level as me despite being 25 years my junior. However, several times a day he telephones his wife and his taciturn manner is replaced by a sickly cooing. “Hello, honey pie,” he says in a baby voice and then asks about the mundane details of her day. Following the recent birth of their first child things have got worse as now the baby is put on the phone and he starts saying “da da da” to the child – who can’t be more than three months old. It is driving me so demented that every time he picks up the phone I find myself tensing up, fearing the soppy nonsense that I am going to be subjected to. Can you recommend anything?
Accountant, male, 55
Update from Lucy: I don’t think the phrase Young Turk is any more racist than the phrase red herring. The young Turks were groups in Ottoman society striving for political change at the end of the Ottoman Emprire. Now it’s used interchangably with young whipersnapper – to mean a thrusting young person. I quite like the phrase, and am surprised that so many readers seem to find it offensive. Either way it has very little bearing on this problem – which is about how to deal with a colleague who makes frequent personal phone calls in a baby voice.
Lucy’s Answer
A small, shared office is a wretched thing. You are practically sitting in each other’s laps for eight hours a day and have to listen to each other, smell each other and pretend to get on. I used to work with someone who spent much of his time calling local police stations as his son kept getting arrested. At least this was more interesting than “da, da, da” – which has nothing to recommend it at all.
It sounds to me as if you are doing rather well in these tricky circumstances. You have every reason to resent your office mate for being so very much younger than you and for doing so much better; the fact that it is only the cooing that gets you down says a lot for you.
Many FT readers have written harsh things about you on the website but, if I were you, I’d put it down to age. This is one of the main gulfs between our baby boomer generation and Generation X. We bark “Yes?” when our families call us at work, while generation X see nothing unseemly about being soppy fathers in public.
This means there is no point in raising the matter with him. He will think you are a crusty old git, which could be unfortunate when he becomes your boss in a couple of years’ time. Instead, you need to find some way of getting the message across subtly. You could try sending out bad vibes – frown, look uncomfortable and shuffle papers in a some-of-us-have- work-to-do way whenever he starts cooing. However, I fear this may not work: if he is blind enough to believe his three-month-old baby likes to chat on the phone, he may be blind to your distress signals.
The best thing is to get up and leave every time he does it. Unless he is phenomenally stupid, he will eventually notice he is inconveniencing you and may join the other young men in the corridors outside making baby talk with their wives and children on their mobile phones.
