Why a colleague's clicking pen annoys me so much

Quân's ballpoint pen has a click button on top. It is black and a little old, with a patch of paint peeling near the clip. It sits at the edge of the desk on the other side of the partition, about an arm's length from my hand, and it gets picked up dozens of times a day.

Click. Click.

Two sounds, and quieter than the air conditioner. Yet since last week, every time I hear them my shoulders tighten, and the row of numbers I am reconciling on the screen goes blurry.

I don't think of myself as fussy. Quân is kind, the sort who brings bánh bò to share with the whole room. So the annoyance makes me feel guilty, and that guilt weighs more than the annoyance itself.

If you have a sound like this of your own, keyboard taps, chewing, a bouncing foot under the desk, a sniffle, then this piece is here to sit next to you for a while. I won't tell you to stop being annoyed. I'll only tell you how I tried to look at it properly, and when I decided it was time to open my mouth.

Being annoyed like this does not mean you are fussy, narrow-hearted or unprofessional. It does not mean that someone who lives mindfully must hear a clicking pen the way they would hear a temple bell. Mindfulness here is not about liking a sound. It is about knowing what you are hearing, and what you are doing with that hearing.

Is the annoyance in the click, or somewhere else?

Two-forty in the afternoon, a Tuesday. The iced coffee beside my hand has lost all its ice, leaving a thin brown layer at the bottom of the glass. The reconciliation file is open, and I am somewhere around row ninety. I am mid-addition when, click. I start the row again. Click. I add it up a third time.

The easy explanation is that the sound is unpleasant. Most people would nod at that, and so did I. But that day I tried something a little silly: I stopped adding and sat there listening to what the sound really was. It was short. It was light. It came every three seconds, then every ten, never evenly. And there was something I had never noticed: between two clicks, my ears did not rest. They kept leaning toward the partition, waiting for the next one.

So I wasn't only hearing the pen. I was guarding against it. Every stretch of quiet was something I held on to like a held breath, waiting for the next click to drop so I could stop bracing. What wore me out was not exactly the sound. It was a night watch nobody had given me and I had taken on myself.

Then I noticed one more layer, and it took me a few days to put a name to it. Each time I guarded, I quietly said a sentence to myself: why can't people be aware. That sentence travelled with the click for so long that, by the time I heard the sound, I was hearing the blame as well. The click was small. The blame was the loud part.

So instead of telling my ears to stop listening, I gave them something else to do. Ears don't stop on command, but give them a new job and they move on fairly easily.

The first time, I was more annoyed. Yes: listening closely made the sound clearer than when I tried to ignore it. If that happens to you, don't drop it too quickly. Around the third day I noticed something small: once, a click came and I didn't look up. Just once, and the next time I looked up again. I did not stop being annoyed after a week, and nobody promised me I would. But the stretch of guarding between two clicks got shorter, at least for me. Some people try this and see no difference at all, and that is normal too.

On a day too busy even for that, the short version is ten seconds: name the sound with one dry word, then find a different sound in the room. For something shorter still, three seconds of mindfulness in a busy day does exactly this, only faster.

The easiest way to spoil this exercise is to force yourself to like the clicking. It is tempting: if I could grow fond of it, I would stop being annoyed. But pushing yourself to be fond of something that bothers you only adds a layer of pretending to a room that was already noisy. It doesn't have to be lovable. It only has to be a sound. And if your attention keeps getting pulled off your work again and again, training mindful attention when the mind is scattered goes further into bringing it back.

Should I tell Quân?

"Tell Quân."

"Tell him what? He's just clicking a pen."

"Then say exactly that. Clicking a pen."

"And then he'll think I'm watching him."

That small argument ran in my head all week, the two voices taking turns like two people on a bus who refuse to look at each other. I left it another three days. The annoyance didn't shrink, it changed shape: I started avoiding the pantry whenever I saw Quân heading that way. A tiny sound had broken something bigger than itself, because Quân and I used to sit and eat snacks together.

People tend to think there are only two roads: put up with it, or have it out. To me they are two quite different things. Listening closely is for understanding what exactly I'm annoyed about. Speaking up is for changing the situation. The first makes the second much easier, because once the ears have stopped guarding, the words come out lighter too. Staying quiet only because you're afraid of upsetting someone is no longer a listening exercise at all. It is something else wearing its clothes.

On Thursday I said it in the pantry, while Quân was making tea.

"Quân, can I ask for something a bit odd?"

"Sure, what is it?"

"Your pen. When I hear the click I lose my place in the sum. Could you switch to one with a cap, or just click it softly when you remember?"

"Oh, I click it? I had no idea. I'll swap it tomorrow."

While Quân answered, I tried to hear the whole sentence before thinking of my reply. That is harder than it sounds, and listening without composing a reply is about exactly that spot. The next day Quân switched to a felt-tip. Three days after that, it was the sound of a paper clip. I laughed to myself, because at least this time I knew what to do with my ears.

When no kind of listening helps

This does happen, so I'll say it plainly. The first reason: the sound is too loud or too constant, and no exercise can repair the room. Moving your seat, wearing headphones, asking the office manager about the partition are all sensible fixes, not a failure of mindfulness. The second reason: some people are more sensitive to certain sounds than others, the way some people mind the sun. That is simply true of them, and nobody has to get used to it.

If the discomfort no longer stops at the pen and lasts all day, spills into the evening, and has your eating and sleeping out of order for several weeks, talk with someone who has the training to help. And if someone is making noise on purpose to provoke you, or mocking you for this, that is not something to breathe through: write down dates and times, tell a person you trust, and go to your direct manager or the HR team.

Three in the afternoon, and Quân's pen lies still in its holder. Outside the window a motorbike revs at the intersection, the air conditioner hums, someone laughs in the next room. I hear all three.

I only hear them.

This article was created with AI assistance.