I do dislike the land-line one. With cell, I and my colleagues usually walk out off the room. While the POTS is not that plain old anymore and it has a wireless handset, if it rings it usually means trouble. The friends never call the POTS, they call through the cell, so it's usually our (mostly English speaking) customers. This is similar to your attitude to FAX: our experience is that those who can't write and read e-mail and prefer to call us, have usually trouble to express themselves clearly through the phone and don't understand the directions either, plus we of course have that language barrier; so the conversations tend to be lengthy with unsatisfactory outcome to both parties and a great likelihood of repeated calls. We usually leave it ringing until the secretary picks it up: not that she can handle the majority of the calls, but at least she gives a bit of hard time having the caller explain her clearly and slowly what or whom does he want ;-).

We are three of us in a room and the doors to the two neighbouring rooms are most of the time wide open. Music is never present, but the overall noise is unavoidable - the multitude of PCs take its toll, the offices are next to a railway and the local airport's runway is just about 5 km apart. I also find the lack of natural illumination and the permanently lit fluorescent light very tiresome, but I cannot do anything about it.

In my previous job, in a similarly sized room, for a couple of years we had a certain machine running 24/7 for testing, with some slowly but permanently rotating parts, and some other parts producing a certain set of movements roughly once in a minute - which was mildly annoying but manageable. But when a colleague across the room started to listen music through earphones, it distracted me so severely that I had to ask her to stop it, even if the "acoustic pressure" of the music must have been close to or below the permanent noise of the machine. There must be something individual in this, as my other colleague in the same room never complained about any noise, even if the lady played the music through speakers (that bad cheap plastic "PC type") when I was not present.

I think there must be lots of very different workplaces around. I would most probably have hard time to accommodate to a cubicle-based office with more than just a few people.

Of course, the ideal situation is, when you're the boss; then you can arrange the workplace to your liking. I wish I would be able to do that one day.

Jan