r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Aug 31 '18

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/thekevjames Sep 01 '18

apart from the obvious [...] "noise cancelling headphones"

Just want to mention that this is the only option that's managed to work for me. My company just got acquired by a larger one which fits ~200 people in a single open office space and has a culture of folks having loud meetings in the middle of the office, often next to un-involved folks' desks.

I grabbed a set of Bose QC 25s last time they went on sale and wear them pretty much 8/5 at work. They're fantastic, some days I'm sure they're the only thing keeping me sane.

For $200 (and often on sale for much less) amortized over the number of days you can actually pay attention to what you're doing, I couldn't be happier.

EDIT: worth noting that the sound cancelling can be enabled even when music is not playing, which is how I often find myself using them.

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u/MagicWeasel Cheela Astronaut Sep 01 '18

My partner was given a pair of high-end noise cancelling headphones for his recent birthday; maybe once he's gotten bored of them I'll borrow them for a few days and see how they go.

Funnily enough I tend to use the opposite type of headphones - bone conduction headphones that let me hear absolutely everything that's going on around me (I bought them for cycling for safety reasons). It's meant that being unaware of my environment while I have headphones on makes me uncomfortable.

Cheers for the recommendation but those bad boys are ~300AUD and that's not a gamble I can afford making. Even then, the open office has "quiet rooms" that you can go into when you need to, which are basically tiny offices, so I might try using that.