How to annoy people
How to annoy people
How to annoy people
1. Specify that your drive-thru order is «to go.»
2. If you have a glass eye, tap on it occasionally with your pen while talking to others.
3. Start each meal by conspicuously licking all your food, and announce that this is so no one will «swipe your grub.»
4. Name your dog «Dog.»
5. Insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions «to keep them tuned up.»
6. Reply to everything someone says with «that’s what you think.»
7. Claim that you must always wear a bicycle helmet as part of your «astronaut training.»
8. Follow a few paces behind someone, spraying everything they touch with a can of Lysol.
9. Make beeping noises when a large person backs up.
10. Do not add any inflection to the end of your sentences, producing awkward silences with the impression that you’ll be saying more any moment.
11. Adjust the tint on your TV so that all the people are green, and insist to others that you «like it that way.»
12. Tell 1-800 operators they sound gay and ask for a date.
13. Sew anti-theft detector strips into people’s backpacks.
14. Hide dairy products in inaccessible places.
15. Order a side of pork rinds with your fillet mignon.
16. Change channels five minutes before the end of every show.
17. Tape pieces of «Sweating to the Oldies» over climatic parts of rental movies.
18. Decline to be seated at a restaurant, and simply eat their complimentary mints by the cash register.
19. Buy a large quantity of orange traffic cones and reroute whole streets.
20. Repeat everything someone says as a question.
22. Inform everyone you meet of your personal Kennedy assassination, UFO, and OJ Simpson conspiracy theories.
23. Repeat the following conversation a dozen times: «Do you hear that?», «What?», «Never mind, it’s gone now.»
24. Light road flares on a birthday cake.
25. Wander around a restaurant, asking other diners for their parsley.
26. At the laundromat, use one dryer for each of your socks.
27. Stand over someone’s shoulder, mumbling as they read.
28. Ask people what gender they are.
29. Lick the filling out of all the Oreos, and place the cookie parts back in the tray.
30. While making presentations, occasionally bob your head like a parakeet.
31. Lie obviously about trivial things such as the time of day.
32. Leave your Christmas lights up and lit until September.
33. Change your name to «John Aaaaasmith» for the great glory of being first in the phone book. Claim it’s a Hawaiian name, and demand that people pronounce each «a.»
34. Sit in your front yard pointing a hair dryer at passing cars to see if they slow down.
35. Chew on pens that you’ve borrowed.
36. Wear a lot of cologne.
37. Listen to 33RPM records at 45RPM speed, and claim the faster speed is necessary because of your «superior mental processing.»
38. Sing along at the opera.
39. Mow your lawn with scissors.
40. At a golf tournament, chant «swing-batabatabata-suhwing-batter!»
41. Ask the waitress for an extra seat for your «imaginary friend.»
42. Go to a poetry recital and ask why each poem doesn’t rhyme.
43. Ask your co-workers mysterious questions and then scribble their answers in a notebook. Mutter something about «psychological profiles.»
44. Select the same song on the jukebox fifty times.
45. Construct elaborate «crop circles» in your front lawn.
46. Make appointments for the 31st of September.
47. Invite lots of people to other people’s parties.
48. Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%, extra dark, 17 inch paper, 99 copies.
49. In the memo field of all your checks, write «for sensual massage.»
50. Stomp on little plastic ketchup packets.
51. Practice making fax and modem noises.
52. Highlight irrelevant information in scientific papers and «cc.» them to your boss.
53. Finish all your sentences with the words «in accordance with prophesy.»
54. Signal that a conversation is over by clamping your hands over your ears.
55. Disassemble your pen and «accidentally» flip the ink cartridge across the room.
56. Holler random numbers while someone is counting.
57. Staple papers in the middle of the page.
58. Publicly investigate just how slowly you can make a «croaking» noise.
59. Honk and wave to strangers.
60. TYPE ONLY IN UPPERCASE.
61. type only in lowercase.
62. dont use any punctuation either
63. As much as possible, skip rather than walk.
64. Try playing the William Tell Overture by tapping on the bottom of your chin. When nearly done, announce «no, wait, I messed it up,» and repeat.
65. Sing the theme to the Batman television show as loudly as you can, over and over and over..
66. Tell people their accent isn’t fooling anyone.
67. Drum on every available surface.
68. Write the surprise ending to a novel on its first page.
69. Set alarms for random times.
70. Learn Morse code and have conversations with friends in public consisting of «Beeeep bip bip beeeep bip..»
71. Buy large quantities of mint dental floss just to lick the flavor off.
72. Leave your Nine Inch Nails tape in Great Uncle Ed’s stereo, with the volume properly adjusted.
73. Dress only in clothes coloured Hunter’s Orange.
74. Wear your pants backwards.
75. Begin all your sentences with «ohh la la!»
76. Rouse your roommates from slumber each morning with Lou Reed’s «Metal Machine Music.»
77. Leave someone’s printer in compressed-italic-landscape mode.
78. Pay for your dinner with pennies.
79. Tie jingle bells to all your clothes.
80. Repeat everything someone says, as a question.
81. Leave tips in Bolivian currency.
82. Demand that everyone address you as «Conquistador.»
83. Push all the flat Lego pieces together tightly.
84. When Christmas carolling, sing «Jingle bells, Batman smells» until physically restrained.
85. Wear a cape that says «Magnificent One.»
86. Finish the 99 bottles of beer song.
87. Sing the «This is the song that never ends» song from Lampchop’s Play-Along.
88. Leave your turn signal on for fifty miles.
89. Pretend your mouse is a CB radio, and talk into it.
90. Drive half a block.
91. Inform others that they exist only in your imagination.
92. Cultivate a Norwegian accent. If Norwegian, affect a southern drawl.
93. «Forget» the punchline to a long joke, but assure the listener it was a «real hoot.»
94. Routinely handcuff yourself to furniture, informing the curious that you don’t want to fall off «in case the big one comes.»
95. Deliberately hum songs that will remain lodged in co-workers’ brains, such as «Feliz Navidad,» the Archies’ «Sugar,» or the Mr. Rogers theme song.
96. Invent nonsense computer jargon in conversations, and see if people play along to avoid the appearance of ignorance.
97. Ask to «interface» with someone.
98. Incessantly recite annoying phrases, such as «sticky wicket isn’t cricket.»
99. Stare at static on the TV and claim you can see a «magic picture.»
100. Scuff your feet on a dry, shaggy carpet and seek out victims.
101. Never make eye contact.
102. Never break eye contact.
103. Construct your own pretend «tricorder,» and «scan» people with it, pronouncing the results.
104. Give a play-by-play account of a person’s every action in a nasal Howard Cossell voice.
105. Occasionally bark in a high-pitched voice.
106. Say «okay, you’re gay» to anything someone says.
107. As peole talk, smell their shoulders.
108. When in a conversation, look out the window, then say «Wait, start over. I wasn’t paying attention.»
109. Say to people, «Did you wear deodorant today?»
110. Place your shoes on the table.
111. When talking to someone, look at a spot about two inches to their right.
112. When standing near a «high-class person,» ask them, «Excuse me, but do I have a booger hanging on my nose? I thought I picked it off.»
113. Switch your neighbour’s lawn furniture with someone else’s.
114. Call into work and tell them you have something better to do today.
115. Buy goldfish and ask the clerk if they come with chips.
116. Sample every flavour of ice cream and tell the clerk what you don’t like about each one.
117. Pick your ear wax and ask if you could use their sleeve to wipe it off.
119. Speak in a strong Welsh accent.
120. Wear odd shoes.
121. Learn «Ice Ice Baby» by heart and recite it endlessly.
122. Disagree strongly with everything anybody says.
123. Throw stones at people walking past your house.
124. Keep changing the TV channel every two seconds.
125. Insist that Celine Dion is better than the Beatles.
126. Whenever anyone says something, laugh loudly as if they have just told and extremely funny joke.
127. Phone McDonald’s and try to make a reservation for that evening.
128. Spend an entire weekend pretending you are R2D2.
129. Phone random numbers and tell them you are holding their daughter hostage.
130. Recite the first 4,000 decimal places of Pi. Then ask if people want to hear it in binary, too.
131. Pretend you have gone comopletely deaf.
132. etirW sdrawkcab.
133. Walk into people’s houses, go straight to the fridge without saying hello, and help yourself to their food.
134. Speak so quietly that people always have to get you to repeat it.
135. Loudly recite people’s most embarrassing secrets in restaurants.
136. Play the electric guitar very loudly and badly, then when the neighbours ask you to turn it down, play even louder. When they come round to complain again, say, «Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you asked me to turn it up!
137. Try to fit the word «cornucopia» into every sentence you say.
138. Drive on the wrong side of the road.
139. Secretly learn to play the piano, then go to a friend’s house who has a piano. Claim you’ve never played before then play Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring perfectly the first time. Then say, «I guess I must kinda be a natural.»
140. Go canoeing and sing the Hawaii Five-0 theme.
141. Claim that until recently, you thought Michael Jackson was a woman.
142. Wear your cap backwards and say «Yo, wazzup?» a lot.
143. Go to a Metallica concert wearing a Michael Bolton T-Shirt.
144. Tell everyone you are Bill Clinton’s cousin.
145. Take photos of people walking down the street and then run away.
146. Dedicate your life to politics, become president of the United States, then raise all taxes to 90%.
147. Down a can of Coke in one and then burp loudly.
148. Insist that it was Bobby who shot J.R.
149. Bark like a dog whenever anyone says the word «the.»
150. Wire up people’s cars so the horn comes on as soon as their car is started.
151. Ride a unicycle to work.
152. E-mail Microsoft to tell them about bugs in Windows ’95 that aren’t actually there.
153. Stare at people for about five minutes, making sure they know you’re staring at them. Then, slowly sneak up to them while humming the Mission: Impossible theme. Sniff their head, then run away. Repeat.
154. Continuously mumble during a conversation.
155. Take off the eraser to every pencil in your house.
156. When in a chat room, spell everything incorrectly.
157. Insist on «Weird Al» sing-a-longs.
158. On a hot summer day, ride up and down the road and drench pedestrians with squirt guns.
159. When walking down a main road, act like a drunk.
160. Wear nothing but white and go mud wrestling.
161. Walk up to someone eating. Lean over and stare at them intently until they notice. Continue to do so until they ask what you’re doing. Reply, «I’ve been watching you eat for the last 30 seconds.. You’re weird!» Leave the restaurant.
162. When walking, talk to yourself constantly.
163. Move people’s bookmarks ahead three pages when they aren’t looking.
164. Call the operator. When asked, «Can I help you?» reply, «No thanks, just browsing.»
165. Go to a gumball machine insert coins until you have a matching pair of fake eyeballs. After attaning these, record the theme song of The Twilight Zone over and over again. Drive down the street wearing the eyeballs and playing The Twilight Zone theme very loud. When you get pulled over, leap into the passenger’s seat and claim, «He was here a minute ago, officer!»
166. On a night other than Halloween, get a few friends together and dress like Jason from Friday the 13th. Place each one a mile apart on an unlit highway.
167. After visiting the local donut shop, sit on the floor cross-legged and insist in a childish voice that you haven’t recieved enough chocolate sprinkles.
168. Push a raisin into someone’s cream-filled donut.
169. Spread fertilizer on half your neighbour’s lawn.
170. Add A535 (liquid heat) to that little hole down the centre of someone’s anti-perspirant.
171. Throw an Oh Henry! in a public pool.
172. When at a party with an infant present, ask the parent for a diaper. Prepare the diaper with Nutella, peanut butter, etc. Insert the diaper into the garbage can. Later, reach into the garbage, pull out the diaper, announce, «Hey, look what I found,» and chow down!
173. At school, stick «presents» in people’s backpacks or purses, such as mud, rocks, sticks, and leaves.
174. Call every pager number you know and leave the number for your local McDonald’s.
175. Wash and scrub the trees in your front lawn.
176. Throw newspapers back at paperboys.
177. Tell people their fly is down when they’re wearing sweat pants.
178. Stand on a busy corner. Gasp, look and point up. See how many people look.
179. At random times in a conversation, say «hi,» «hello Sir, how are you?» or «have a good day, thank you.»
Now for 180. Forward stupid chain letters to as many people as you can.
How to Annoy Your Family and Friends
This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Hannah Madden. Hannah Madden is a writer, editor, and artist currently living in Portland, Oregon. In 2018, she graduated from Portland State University with a B.S. in Environmental Studies. Hannah enjoys writing articles about conservation, sustainability, and eco-friendly products. When she isn’t writing, you can find Hannah working on hand embroidery projects and listening to music.
There are 14 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.
This article has been viewed 78,512 times.
Annoying your family and friends can be lots of fun (for you, that is). Irritating someone, getting them to yell, or putting them in a bad mood can help you pass the time if you’re super bored. Try any one of these tricks on your friends or family members to really aggravate them throughout the day. Be careful that you don’t annoy them too much, though, or you could make them seriously mad!
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\u00a9 2022 wikiHow, Inc. All rights reserved. wikiHow, Inc. is the copyright holder of this image under U.S. and international copyright laws. This image is not licensed under the Creative Commons license applied to text content and some other images posted to the wikiHow website. This image may not be used by other entities without the express written consent of wikiHow, Inc.
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About this article
Annoying your family and friends can be a fun way to pass the time as long as you don’t take it too far. Try singing a song the person hates or playing it on your phone. Or, disagree with everything they say until they give up talking to you. If you’re feeling crafty, pull a prank on them, like jumping out and scaring them or pretending you broke something expensive of theirs. You can also call them silly names, like something that rhymes with their real name. Annoying people can be a good joke, but if they actually start to get upset or angry, back off and apologize since you don’t want to cross the line into bullying. For more tips, including how to annoy someone by pointing out everything they do wrong, read on!
How to annoy people
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To really annoy people you need to flex your wealth
To do this you must wear one of the following:
— Gordon freeman outfit
— Alyx outfit
— Any collectors edition outfit
— Any outfit from level 15 or further on the battle pass
— Even one of the fast food DLC outfits
How to act in each race game will be covered here
Dizzy heights:
On the spinning platforms make sure you grab people as they are about to jump, this will hold them back and slow them down.
On the part where balls roll at you try to prevent people from hiding behind walls by blocking their path. You can also attempt to push people of the ramps at the top
See Saw:
This one is easy to annoy people.
Stand at one end of a vital seesaw at the end of each section so it is almost vertical. This will prevent people from progressing to the next section
Door dash:
This game is more difficult to slow people down but taking the lead will make people instinctively follow you so jumping into a false door will slow them down.
Gate crash:
Grab people as they near the gates, if you time it right the gate will close on them and they wont be able to pass through.
On the slime ramp at the end grab people going down to stop them jumping at the end
Tip Toe:
Literally just walk behind everyone as they wont want to risk falling off on fake tiles.
The Whirlygig:
After the first section, everyone will attempt to climb a wall. If you are quick enough to climb the wall first you can push the peasants people down who are slower than you.
If you aren’t quick enough you can grab people who are trying to climb/jump up and prevent them from progressing
Slime climb:
This game mode is difficult for the average player so you will have an advantage.
On any obsticle, grabbing a player will slow them down. This is especially effective on the conveyor belt section or the slime part at the top.
Fruit chute:
This game can also be difficult for some players so you are one up.
On the very first drop, try and land on someone as it will make them fall over and slide off the back of the conveyor belt.
Grabbing people as they try to progress is very effective because they are already moving slow and at risk of falling over from the objects.
How to act in each survival game will be covered here
Jump club:
Grabbing people as the beam approaches is an easy way to stop them jumping, running into them can work also because they can fall over but it’s not as effective.
Roll out:
Walk into people who are close to the edge of the section causing them to fall into the slime. This is a very good way to annoy people as they will be very stressed already from working out where to move.
Grabbing people on a section with a wall coming is good also because they cant run to avoid it.
Block party:
When a person is near a far end and a wall is coming, grab them to slow them down.
Also grab them when the blocks that you must jump over come to prevent them from jumping.
Near the end of the game, the walls narrow. This is a good opportunity for you to push someone behind an oncoming obstacle as there is less room for them to escape.
Perfect match:
When the image is selected, try to block the path of anyone who left it to late. This will stop them from getting on the platform and falling in the slime.
Tail tag:
Play the game really well and dont lose your tail.
Try to lead some people on by letting them close but not close enough.
How to act in each team game will be covered here
IMPORTANT COSMETIC:
WEAR THE PINEAPPLE SUIT (This may not be possible if you didn’t claim it when it was in the store)
As shown below, it disguises you so other teams wont be able to recognise your team
Rock ‘N’ Roll:
Once your teams ball is roughly 30% through the course. Run to the end and attempt to jump around the wall to slow other teams.
If this doesnt work, jump off the end and try to push other teams balls back up the hill.
This is just playing the minigame but is a very effective way to annoy people
Fall Ball:
When you see a player running for the ball, grab them to slow them down and buy your team time.
Defend the goal to stop balls going in. This will annoy people as they have pushed the ball all the way up and you stopped them from scoring.
Team Tail Tag:
Much like normal tail tag, lead people on but don’t let them catch you.
Try to target one or two individuals to put pressure on them
Jinx:
If you start as jinxed or get jinxed, target one or two people to scare them and force them to play harder which may cause them to slip up.
If you are not jinxed, hide on the centre of the spinner or on the bridge and if you see someone close, avoid them well by ditching your spot as fast as possible.
Hoopsie Daisy:
Go for the closest ring to you.
If you see a player running for a ring but you are closer try to reach it before them.
Stand on a spinner as rings often spawn on them so you can easily get some points.
Hoarders:
Grab people that try to push balls out of your zone as it will slow them down.
Sneak your way into an enemy zone and try to push the ball without being noticed (very difficult so I recommend doing the next tactic)
Go with a large group of your team to get a ball which only a small number of opponents are near. This gives your team more angles to control the ball
How to act in each Final game will be covered here
Fall mountain:
Ideally you start on the front row.
Try to play the game and be the fastest.
Losing the crown will annoy everyone.
Follow the path below as it is a fast route
Hex-A-Gone:
Cutting off peoples paths and using their resources is a good way to make them drop a level.
Jumping from hexagon to hexagon slowly will also allow you to stay up longer.
Royal fumble:
Try to outwit the person with the tail to grab it from a direction they didn’t expect.
If you have the tail, keep running circles around the map but look out for anyone using tactic 1.
An Alarm Designer on How to Annoy People in the Most Effective Ways
There’s an art and science to making one sound seem more urgent than another.
When the cockpit recorder transcript from Air France Flight 447 was leaked to the public in 2011, many startling details emerged. The plane, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people on board, had been under the control of pilots who were communicating poorly and not realizing one another’s mistakes. The plane’s speed slowed to dangerous levels, activating the stall alarm—the one, in the words of Popular Mechanics, “designed to be impossible to ignore.” It blared the word “Stall!” 75 times.
Everyone present ignored it. Within four minutes, the plane had hit the water.
Alarm sounds are engineered to elicit particular responses in humans. And yet, sometimes, humans choose not to respond, having decided that the situation is not urgent enough or that the sound is a false alarm. Audio alarm designers seek to avoid this by designing sounds that have an intuitive meaning and precisely reflect the level of urgency. But what makes an “awooga” sound more or less urgent than a “ding”? And how do you create an alarm noise that’s annoying enough to get someone’s attention, but not so annoying that said person disables the alarm?
Auditory alarm designers like Carryl Baldwin face these questions regularly. Baldwin, a human factors psychologist, constructs sounds in a lab, tests those sounds on human subjects to see if they are communicating the intended meaning, and ensures they are appropriate for use as alarms in household, aviation, medical, and automotive settings.
Alarms in the cockpit can conflict with one another. Joao Carlos Medau/CC BY 2.0
Of course, the door alarm that LG uses in its fridges to convey “Your food needs to stay cold, silly” should be different than the alarm that signals your commercial jet is about to crash. But what factors go into the design of these sounds?
One of the main considerations is the annoyance factor. To test for annoyance in the lab, says Baldwin, “we’ll construct sounds and we’ll look at all of the different acoustic parameters, so we might vary, for instance, intensity, frequency, the number of harmonics, how fast it ramps up and down, the temporal characteristics—like whether it’s going d-d-d-d-d-duh rapidly or duhhhh-duhhhhh-duhhhh.”
The faster an alarm goes, the more urgent it tends to sound. And in terms of pitch, alarms start high. Most adults can hear sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz—Baldwin uses 1,000 Hz as a base frequency, which is at the bottom of the range of human speech. Above 20,000 Hz, she says, an alarm “starts sounding not really urgent, but like a squeak.”
Harmonics are also important. To be perceived as urgent, an alarm needs to have two or more notes rather than being a pure tone, “otherwise it can sound almost angelic and soothing,” says Baldwin. “It needs to be more complex and kind of harsh.” An example of this harshness is the alarm sound that plays on TVs across the U.S. as part of the Emergency Alert System. The discordant noise is synonymous with impending doom.
After the alarm designers create a range of sounds in the lab, says Baldwin, they will test the annoyance factor of these sounds in a process called “psychophysical matching, or psychophysical ratings.” Yes, this involves subjecting human beings to a bunch of irritating sounds. Participants determine how annoying the sounds are by sorting them into categories ranking them on a scale of one to 100.
Then there’s more testing. “If it’s a medical alarm, for instance, we’ll start using that sound and then we’ll maybe measure people’s physiological response to it—does their heart rate go up, does their skin conductance level go down, what happens to their brain activity,” says Baldwin. Skin conductance measures how much the sound affects the body—skin gets better at conducting electricity when the body is physiologically aroused.
An effective audio alarm is one in which the annoyance factor and perceived urgency of the sound is matched to the hazard level—a soft little chime for the fridge door, say, and a “BREHHHHK BREHHHHK BREHHHHK” for a plane in a tailspin. “We want it to be detectable, so to get your attention, but for you to recognize what it means right away,” says Baldwin.
One factor that the design of individual alarms doesn’t take into account is how that sound will mesh with the other audio in its intended environment. This is especially relevant in the medical and aviation fields, in which multiple alarms and alerts may be pinging and screeching at the same time—and indicating widely varying levels of danger.
In hospitals in particular, there are “so many nuisance alarms going off all the time, that people—nurses, doctors—just tune them out,” says Baldwin. “They don’t even hear them anymore.” The statistics say that most of these alarms are not indications of peril. A 2012 review of medical audio alarms found that in one intensive therapy unit, “ of 1455 soundings of alarms, only eight were associated with potentially life-threatening problems.”
“Oh, that vitals monitoring thing? The alarm goes off all the time, just ignore it.” Quinn Dombrowski/CC BY-SA 2.0
These noises, says Baldwin, are “having a negative impact on the stress levels of both the medical providers and the patients, from having these constant annoying alarms going off in the background.”
Audio warnings that go off simultaneously in a cockpit can have a similar effect on pilots. The paper Auditory Warning Sounds in the Work Environment offers this worrying tale from a pilot:
I was flying in a Jetstream at night when my peaceful reverie was shattered by the stall audio warning, the stick shaker, and several warning lights. The effect was exactly what was NOT intended; I was frightened numb for several seconds and [took hands off] instruments trying to work out how to cancel the audio/visual assault rather than taking what should be instinctive actions.
The current way to prevent such a confusing cacophony in the workplace is via “alarm management,” a process that looks at the full line-up of possible alert sounds within one environment and how they combine. The phrase “alarm philosophy” is also bandied about in these circles—it involves prioritizing alarms to ensure that the sounds that signal a potentially life-threatening moment are the most attention-getting.
How to Work With Irritating People
Dealing With Minor but Persistent Annoying Behavior
Greg grits his teeth and takes a deep breath. «Be calm,» he tells himself. «Don’t let it get to you. It’s just Carl being Carl.»
But Greg has been gritting his teeth for months now, and he’s finding Carl’s irritating behavior increasingly disruptive and distracting. There’s the frequent cursing, the «reply all» to emails, the smelly sandwiches, and the black hole of scattered papers that is his desk.
Greg doesn’t know what to do. Should he continue to ignore it and pretend everything’s fine? Confront Carl? Talk to his supervisor? Go to HR? Or maybe even look for a job in another department?
Click here to view a transcript of this video.
Examples of Irritating or Annoying Behavior
Irritating behavior can be defined as a person’s annoying habits that bother you often and, eventually, drain your energy and morale. Examples might include:
Often, these behaviors are perceived to be unimportant and so go unchallenged. You might feel that you’ll come across as a «killjoy» if you ask a colleague to change what they’re doing, particularly if it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else and it isn’t affecting his or her ability to work.
But failing to address such issues can leave you feeling helpless, deflated and miserable. Eventually, that niggling little habit can become a major distraction, and it may cause resentment and anger to build up. This can threaten personal and team relationships, and impact your productivity.
Dealing With Irritating Behavior in the Workplace
In this section, we look at seven tips for tackling a co-worker’s irritating behavior in a tactful but assertive way.
1. Avoid Gossip
It can be easy to vent your frustration about your irritating colleague by complaining about him to another co-worker. But spreading rumors in this way can be divisive and destructive. Not only that, but you might find that it backfires on you, and you could end up looking like the «bad guy.»
Warning:
2. Assess the Impact
What we find irritating can be very subjective. So, before you decide how to approach the problem, take a step back and look at it objectively. How much does your colleague’s behavior really affect you? Do other people on your team seem bothered by it? Do you feel able to cope with it on your own? Or, do you need to refer it to your manager?
The level of action that you take should correspond to how serious you feel his behavior to be. If he persistently talks loudly on the phone, for instance, perhaps you could just wear earplugs or politely ask him to «keep it down.» But, if you think his behavior is aggressive or damaging, then you’ll likely need to refer the matter to your manager or HR department.
3. Be Tactful!
It can be hard to keep your emotions in check when you’re faced with persistent, irritating behavior, and «bottling them up» can often make things worse. But, remember that it’s the behavior that’s the issue, not the person. Your colleague is likely unaware of the impact her annoying habit is having on you.
For example, you could say: «Hey, Dina, I love your taste in music but I’m on a tight deadline today and really need to focus. Any chance you could turn it down, just for a while, please?»
4. Consider Any Underlying Causes
5. Be Open and Honest
Start a «savvy» conversation with your colleague. Be open and honest with her about how you feel, but also show respect, and listen to her reply with empathy and without judgment. Savvy conversations are designed to enable people to talk freely with each other in a way that avoids conflict or distrust.
If tensions do run high, try asking an impartial colleague to mediate the discussion. Mediation is an informal conflict-resolution tool that can help to improve trust and team relationships.
6. Seek Support
If behavior shifts from being irritating to serious – in cases of persistent lateness or bullying, for example – it becomes a performance or disciplinary issue. In these circumstances, it’s best that you let your manager or HR take the lead.
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7. Develop Coping Mechanisms
If you think that a colleague’s irritating behavior is unlikely to change, or you choose to ignore it, make sure that you have adequate coping strategies.
Try deep breathing exercises or mindfulness to help to keep calm and focused. Or, if it’s a «noisy neighbor» that’s the problem, you could try using earplugs or noise-canceling headphones. Perhaps you could change desks, or adjust your workstation to make his irritating behavior less visible or distracting.
Managing Irritating Behavior in Your Team
It’s important that you take seriously any team member’s complaint about a colleague’s irritating behavior. You may have observed the problem yourself, or perhaps other people have raised similar complaints. But you need to be seen to be fair, and not to leap to conclusions.
If the person’s performance is otherwise exemplary, the accusations could actually be the result of jealousy. Talk to her about her working relationships and listen empathically to her response. Reassure her that you will not accept bullying behavior and that you are committed to resolving the situation.
However, if her irritating habit does need to be addressed, be frank with her and make clear what your organization considers to be acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Share and discuss any code of conduct with all of your team to show that the individual is not being singled out or victimized.
Managing Your Own Annoying Behavior
Chances are, you have quirks or habits that really bug one of your co-workers! It can come as an unpleasant surprise to learn this, and you may feel a range of emotions, from embarrassment and shock to anger and shame. But try to avoid reacting negatively, and use the following approaches to deal with the issue calmly and rationally:
Key Points
Irritating behavior is persistent, annoying, but apparently minor. Ignoring it, or tackling it carelessly, can negatively affect you and your team’s morale, relationships and performance. So, follow these seven tips to improve the situation:
If you manage a team in which a complaint has been raised, avoid leaping to conclusions and be seen to treat everyone fairly.
Finally, if someone criticizes you for being irritating, try to adjust your behavior in a positive way. But, if you think the complaint is unfair, say so!
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