You’re sitting at your desk, working away. Your eyes are burning into your computer screen and you can hear the faint clicks of your keyboard. You are in the zone. Then all of a sudden your neighbor shouts, “OMG! Are you kidding me??” This fool just killed your work buzz.
A cube cry is that random outburst you hear when a colleague gets vocal with their frustrations. I bet you know of someone that uses these random outbursts and hear them often. The loud “ugh!” is another common one. They don’t really expect an answer or a response to this. They just feel upset about the situation they think was forced onto them. Their reaction is an attempt to pacify the stressful situation. Kinda like babies. When they’re upset with something, you’ll know about it when they’re throwing a fit.
Some people have enough experience to be immune to this. Think about your experience. Have you ever noticed how the tension rises when you hear that cube cry? If you’re able to block it out, that’s awesome. But be careful, these moods are contagious no matter how much experience you have dealing with them. If it goes on long enough it will become a larger distraction and your true feelings won’t be so easy to hide.
The cube cries aren’t going away. We cannot control the actions of others. So I recommend just being an observer in this kind of situation. You don’t want to question people when they freak out like this. It will only feed them more attention and give them reasons to continue feeling the way they do. If you feel you have to say something about it then offer a few words of encouragement. They may fire back at you but at least you made an effort to mitigate their addictive attitude.
When you react with an outburst, you actually create the scenario that upsets you – it’s your action. It will grow and spread to others even if you don’t intend it to. You may not like how you’re being treated but you do ultimately choose how to react. Sometimes we won’t notice till after it’s happened. It’s your awareness that gives you the ability to control your response. If you keep your cool, that upsetting situation won’t be worth your memory.
It’s probably safe to say that you did not intentionally provoke another person or break your computer. It’s okay to be upset. You’re not going live the rest of your life in oblivious happiness. We are all unique with a wide range of feelings. Expressing how upset you are won’t fix the problem, it amplifies it. Nobody is coming to save you. If others give in to your complaints then they would just be feeding them.
Cube criers may have valid reasons to be upset, but blurting it out just spreads the problem around. Find a better approach that actually helps you. The more you resist your frustration, the more you acknowledge it to be unstable. Do you want to describe your problem? Or do you want to fix it?
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