I really, really hate to talk about this, because on the whole he's a really good person. We talk a lot. We commiserate a lot over the crappy papers we sometimes run across. And he has apologized profusely over the times he has coughed and sneezed. It's just that there are so many people that have weirded me out and infuriated me to no end, and, well, I might as well get this off my chest.
Unfortunately, his work rate (not him, and I want to emphasize that) bothers me a lot. I am easily distracted when I see the constant clicking and dimming that indicates a scorer has submitted his or her score for the essay that he or she looked over and is waiting for the next one to load. I have trouble ignoring the computer screens of the people who sit in the row in front of me; once I see one of theirs go dark for a second, I can't help but divert my attention to it, and I thus lose my place in the answer I'm working on.
It is just as worse, if not moreso, with my co-worker friend because he sits in the computer next to me. My peripheral vision catches all the papers he's going through, and he goes through a lot of them. He's fast. Really fast. Too fast, actually; he's doing so much that he truly is running us out of a job. And that further feeds my distraction; not only can I not help but turn my head and see him go through yet another essay while I'm stuck re-reading mine a second (or third or fourth) time, I notice that he's just whipping through them. That's reflected in the numbers we get about our production after lunch. And the gap between how many he's reading vs. how many I'm reading demoralizes me even more, to the point where sometimes I work even slower.
To block out his pace, and to a lesser extent those of the people in front of me, I now wear hooded sweatshirts. Whenever I feel like I'm looking more at their screens than mine, I flip the hood on, cover as much of the periphery as I can, and focus. It helps to a certain extent, although thinking about sex or getting thrown out of the house can make me space out for minutes at a time. I don't know how bad I would be, day after day, if I didn't wear a hoodie.
It would be better, to be honest, if he scooted down one seat. Our immediate supervisor was at the end of our four-chair row, but he actually moved to another room because he's starting on another project. If my co-worker friend moved one computer to the right, we both would have space next to us so we could spread out and evaluate without being bothered by a person next to us. That would be a win-win, no?
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