office personality
First, because this post could be taken the wrong way, let me just say that there’s no judging herein. How someone talks and laughs is not in any way a reflection on the person. If someone’s a bitch, they will be whether they speak with a Gabriel-esque baritone or with a high-pitched wheeze. Someone nice and loving and sweet like Girlfriend could laugh like s/he’s vomiting straw she doesn’t; whew.
Take me for instance. I talk through the raspy, obnoxious voice of a twelve-year-old who recently undertook an unnecessary rhinoectomy. Think of the neighborhood kid you know the one i’m talking about yelling into your eye while holding his nose after stuffing a bag of cheddar cheese and cracker Combos into his maw. How do they taste so much like cheese and crackers while smelling so much like vomit? See? Can’t judge.
Anyway. I speak no ill of the person, just the particularly glaring aural trait.
back-of-throat talker:
Listening to this voice is like eavesdropping on the struggle between life and time. Time always wins but life puts up a valiant struggle with terrifying face-lifts, giant breathing machines and water aerobics. The voice, in this strange-even-for-me analogy is time. It sounds like the tongue has been completely factored out of the equation, which is never. never. never. good.Worse, anything said in this voice sounds unsettling and sinister, even with the slight lisp. If this could be duplicated through hours of therapy, practice and pain, every villian in history, from the Serpent to G.W. Bush if your particular type of history is based on a book of metaphors you call “facts”, would speak the same way. Ghastly.
valley-girl talker:
Everyone knows one of these. Actually, half of you probably talk like this. You use all those elongated vowels and end everything in a question and orally toss your blond hair behind you with a shrug all Charlie’s-Angels-style. I don’t know why this one annoys me so much but I usually have to fight the urge to flick whoever it is in the forehead and hiss through gritted teeth, “it’s not ‘like’, it’s never ‘like;’ just say it!”Incidentally, I had a professor who said “which is to say” seventy times on average, counted 115 once in a two and a half hour class. Not surprisingly, he never said anything. I received a solid D under his terrible tutelage.
every-stereotypical-voice-of-an-overbearing-wife talker(s):
There are two of these wandering the felt-covered quasi-hallways of the office. From the depths of what I can only imagine is my own personal Hell, their voices boil up and spew forth as a combination of every annoyed husband’s mocking impression of his nagging wife. To make matters worse, these are the loudest and hardest to prepare for of the five herein.I picture myself as a bunny, grazing innocently under a hedge, unaware. There’s probably some Burt Bacharach playing quietly. I turn slightly, my big black doughy eyes catching the hint of movement as the neighbors’ doberman clamps its gigantic jaws around my tiny neck before violently lifting me from the ground and snapping my neck, granting me peaceful, black sleep.
The car-alarm-like voice is the doberman and, unfortunately, the sleep never comes. It never comes.
fight-of-your-life laugher:
Ever heard an asthmatic coughing in a dust storm through the last half-mile of a marathon? Or the desperate choked gasps of a person too far from shore just before they dropped below the water forever? Or that noise when a cat has a particularly large hairball it can’t seem to dislodge? Combine them.This one I actually feel bad about. It genuinely sounds excruciating, like each halted honk could be the last, could be the end-scene of his/her life. What a way to go though, eh? Laughing your ass off to something that’s only superficially funny surrounded by people you don’t even like? What. A. Way. To. Go. ::sigh::
ultra-fake laugher:
If you stare into the eyes of a psychopath, a serial killer or an amoral pedophile if the eyes happen to belong to all three, run the fuck out of there you can feel the coldness of evil, the gaping blackness. That, or listen to the hollow reflexive cackle that only has the slightest hint of humanity.It rings out bold and confident and emotionless, echoing off itself across the void where life should be. At every bone-shuddering bout of vacuous guffaw my soul screams shrilly in pain. So familiar, that.