Eponymous

The building I work in is like most office spaces, where there are a handful of office rooms with doors and a lot of floor space divided up by desks that make half-assed cubicles. The part of the office I work in is fairly open in that we have our desks with tall hutches marking off each of our own desk areas. Being in the marketing department, the noise level is generally low in this area, so there isn't much need for cubicle components such as partitions. But there are a few people in my department who make me wish my desk were surrounded by cinder block walls.

One of these people, who I will refer to as Jeans, works a few desks down from mine. "Jeans" is short for "Dad Jeans" because the clothing he wears, specifically his pants, are unflattering and unfashionable, just like Mom Jeans. Jeans is my arch-nemesis. Jeans annoys the crap out of me for many reasons. Jeans is a very loud talker, and is oblivious to this fact. He spends most of his day either carrying on non-work related conversations from his desk, or meandering around our department carrying on non-work related conversations. Regardless of who he is talking to or the nature of the conversation, his speaking volume starts out at like 7 or 8. And if the conversation involves something that excites him, such as statistics, home schooling, or Meatloaf, then his volume goes up to eleven.

Not only is Jeans a loud talker, but most of what comes out of his mouth makes me want to throw rocks at it. Jeans likes to talk about his children - a lot. He and his wife have six children, all under the age of 10 and home schooled, and are expecting a seventh spawn sometime this summer. I believe the reason for all the ankle biters is that she is uber Catholic and wears the pants (i.e. micro manages his cock). Between home schooling and talking about his kids, there's a whole lot of his chit chat I can do without.

I can also do without his views on, well, everything. At first blush he comes off as an educated, intelligent, and well spoken guy. Listening to him for more than five minutes, it becomes apparent that he's one of those people who knows just enough to be dangerous, but makes up for his real depth of knowledge by talking a lot. Being the data analyst and statistician for our company, he does actually know a lot about those subjects. Unfortunately he attempts to apply professional analysis to every topic of conversation. For instance, he spent the whole week after returning from his vacation to Disney World by analyzing the behavior of his kids and how that related to the park operations. Seriously?!

The real kicker, for me, is when he divulges on matters of pop culture. This guy is far from the pulse of anything remotely current. At times he appears to be proud of his lack of knowledge. As if that somehow excuses him from making ignorant comments about a certain film or genre of music. At other times he'll act like a self proclaimed expert on American Idol because he watched one episode in the middle of the season. Since his faux agrarian home life doesn't let him out much, he treats the one movie a year he gets to see as "teh best evr!!1!".

Personally, I look down on people who are obsessed with Top 40 music and American Idol, but really, it's just a matter of taste. I probably shouldn't fancy myself a snob when it comes to these things because I don't give mainstream stuff a fair shake when it comes to truly appreciating it. Between spending way too much time on the interwebs and my girlfriend always having VH1 on, I think I have enough exposure to mainstream pop culture to shit on it all I want.

One thing I can't stand is when people comment on pop culture and have zero basis for voicing their opinions. Jeans is one of these people. To the untrained ear, he probably sounds like he has valid reasons for disliking rap music yet comes across as kind of hip because he liked Hey Ya. To me, and anyone else who gets that, this comes across as extremely lame. I admit that getting this bent out of shape over pop culture is petty, but when I have to constantly jack up the volume of my headphones to drown out his diarrhea of the mouth, it becomes a little more personal.

Jeans is not innately a bad person. He's a good hearted guy who is extremely annoying to certain people who have figured him out. Basically, Jeans is Ned Flanders. Sure, Ned Flanders is a likeable character in the small doses you get of him in your 20+ minutes of a Simpsons episode. But if you had to work with Ned for 40 hours a week, every week, then you may develop anger issues. This is why I miss my partition.