Deafening Silence
Jun 27th, 2006 by Jason
Yesterday at work, the normally very reliable overhead ‘masking noise’ generator decided to EVP someone’s dead cat in with the otherwise soothing (note: I’m not a musician) white noise that it normally provides.
Nobody could figure out what the problem was, so they turned it off. Wow. Talk about “you don’t know what you have til it’s gone”.
Without the ‘masking noise’ on and ummm, … masking noise (in an office of 300+), here’s a short list of things that are suddenly make me want to kill:
1. people who type with their fingernails (you can hear keyboards from 300 feet away now)
2. squeaky printers
3. people who feel the need to raise their voice 50db when they answer their phone
4. people running around giggling and then going “shhhhhhh”
(fortunately, giving them evils takes care of the last two) 
Do you know what the noise generator is called?
So our building gets hit by lightning (making a noise loud enough to cause 85% of the few hundred people that were here today to scream/yell, and shaking the building hard enough to cause major dust to fall from the ceiling tiles Mt. St. Helens style).
What gets knocked out?
The HVAC and the sound masking. hah hah
Michael, I’ll see if I can find out what that sound generator is called. I must have missed your comment until I went back looking for this entry — sorry about that.
So are you saying that the sound masking unit died twice now, less than a month apart…
Amazing that a lightning hit would cause so little damage. (Or at least that has been found so far.)
The sound masking ended up coming back on an hour or so after the lightning hit. Apparently it was on a circuit that popped. :shrug: