Top Pet Peeves Revealed

We all have pet peeves at work. Perhaps it's the person who invades your space, the boss who is always checking up on you, or perhaps there's a colleague who always takes the last cup of coffee in the break room and doesn't make a new pot. Regardless of your top pet peeve, there is one thing that's certainly worse: you could be doing something that's someone else's top pet peeve!

Harris Interactive surveyed 2,318 employed adults for Atlanta-based Randstad's monthly Job Bites survey on workplace etiquette. Here is what the survey revealed.

• Thirty-two percent of employees listed "loud talkers" as one of their biggest pet peeves at work.
• Forty-four percent of those polled said condescending tones were the worst.
• Thirty-seven percent found public reprimands at work particularly irritating.
• Micromanaging struck a nerve with 34 percent of the respondents, even more than cell phones ringing (30 percent), use of speakerphones in public areas (22 percent) and using PDAs during meetings (9 percent).
• Eleven percent of those polled hate it when colleagues engage in personal conversations in the workplace.

Don't let yourself become the office pet peeve. If you're guilty of any of the above, you'll probably want to eliminate or modify the behavior.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
-Albert Einstein