#bc they all interact and they have overlapping effects and i feel self conscious about being corrected on it

[la-principessa-nuova]

there’s one person on my team who has a lot of background noise and a voice that happens to work with the background noise cancellation in a way that is a sensory nightmare for me. So when he talks, if I’m even remotely dysregulated, I have to mute the call and wait for him to be done talking, and even if i don’t have to, it’s often better to avoid using up a limited number of spoons for the day.

I barely work him with because he kind of has his own subset of work that’s related to my team’s work but due to various reasons only he can work on it (and has backups that are not on the team, not like a bottleneck on one person)

but that means when he gives his updates and explains things, it’s extra important for me to understand what he’s saying, because it’s stuff I need to plan around but have no other insight into.

And even though I can read it on the captions, it’s (1) harder to follow than both audio and captions together, and (2) usually very, very wrong because this is somebody with (a) poor audio quality and (b) a different accent/regional dialect than the captions were trained on and (c) using technical language and sometimes internal-only acronyms.

so yeah, i need to look into finding some ways to work around this like figuring out more about what he does so i have an easier time figuring out what he’s saying from context, and also solving my long-term burnout that’s decreased my window of tolerance so much. Because I’ve worked with so many people with such terrible audio quality but I’ve never had this much of an issue before.

Even with other people with kind of bad audio instead of a little grating, it feels like nails on a chalkboard. But also it might be a little bit OCD because it’s definitely worse if I’ve been thinking about it happening with one person where it can happen to that lesser degree with almost anybody. And then fact that thinking it’s going to be dysregulating makes it dysregulate more and then i can’t focus and my thoughts get stuck on it and i feel a panic because now i’m worried i won’t understand anything and i’m going to be behind and get in trouble for not listening and get caught not knowing something that was just presented… and then it’s not just dysregulation but also anxiety.

and of course it’s not easy from an audio processing perspective too, so i’m sure the anxiety about a challenging audio processing challenge contributes, plus having to pay attention to something i have no context on, which brings up a lot of anxiety from ADHD-related C-PTSD. this brain is such a tangled mess…