Take a guess. What do folks hate the most about work?
The boss?
Their colleagues?
Their job assignments?
Nope.
They hate cell phones. To be exact — the gangsta-rapping, Sinatra-crooning, Clay Aiken-braying ring tones of their co-workers' cell phones.
As ring tones have become the soundtrack to our daily lives, some employees are becoming nostalgic for the good old days — you know, when pretty much all a cell phone did was make calls and politely beep when someone called you.
"It's really and truly an annoying phenomenon," said Jan Hougland, a legal secretary at a law firm in downtown Sacramento, Calif. "If it was just a ring, it would sound like a telephone. It becomes a madhouse when there are several different ring tones going off at the same time."
At 62, Hougland remembers a more blissful time — when phones weren't portable and the phone on your desk had the same ring as everyone else's. Back then, Mozart's "Fur Elise" (the first musical ring tone) wasn't jostling for attention with rapper 50 Cent's "In Da Club" (the most popular ring tone today, according to IDC, a technology research firm in Framingham, Mass.).
Not surprisingly, in a recent survey of workplace "pet peeves" among U.S. employees, 30 percent cited annoying ring tones as the most irritating part of their workday. That's only slightly behind "loud talkers" (32 percent), but well ahead of the use of speaker phones in public areas (22 percent) and PDAs (personal digital assistants) during meetings (9 percent), according to Randstand USA, a work-force staffing company.
At a previous job, Dick Myers, 55, was so bothered by a colleague's ring tone that he felt compelled to leave a warning on her desk — a small bucket of water next to the ringing phone.
"It (the ring tone) was this loud, obnoxious voice that would announce to the whole world that my colleague had a phone call," said Myers, who is now an accounting consultant with Aerojet. "It would go off every 10 minutes."
Rather than risk getting her phone dunked in a water bucket, Myers said, his co-worker switched to the vibrate setting on her phone.
But cell phones aren't going mute anytime soon. The ring tone market is rapidly accelerating — sales of ring tones jumped from about $150 million in 2003 to about $300 million in 2004, according to Consect, a mobile market analysis firm.
But cell phones are more than just a communication device.
"The cell phone for some people is really an extension of who you are," said Scott Campbell, a University of Michigan assistant professor who studies how cell phones affect society. "It represents you symbolically. The way it looks, the way it sounds — it represents what your interests are."
Perhaps that's where the real conflict lies — when the mobility and individuality made possible by cell phones comes into conflict with the conformity and close proximity found in many workplaces.
"Cell phones really give a lot of people the freedom and autonomy to do what they want to do, and that does irk authority figures," said Campbell. "It creates an underlying tension."
It also creates a workplace cacaphony of incoming calls.
"Folks will pick different ring tones for different people," said Campbell, which means you could be hearing James Blunt for a lover, hip-hop for a friend, Sinatra for Uncle Frank.
That's OK when walking down a city street, perhaps, but it can create audible chaos for those within earshot in the nearest cubicle.
That's prompted human resources experts to take a look at what they can do. Nearly 40 percent of American companies had devised a written policy for cell phone use, and 10 percent more were working on one, according to a 2005 survey by the Washingon, D.C.-based Society for Human Resource Management.
Still, ring tones are tricky to regulate at work, said Chris Churchill, a Los-Angeles based human resources expert who helps companies devise policies for emerging technologies.
"What you might find loud, or you might find annoying, is a subjective thing," he said. "It's kind of like taste in music."
Churchill often recommends that his clients come up with blanket policies — i.e., all cell phones should be on vibrate or mute settings at work, or are outright banned in the office.