The Quiet Room

Being isolated from excessive outside noise is a utopia.  At least I thought it was until the research department found reports that indicate the exact opposite is true.  AcMo spent a great deal of time creating quiet labs modeled after IBM’s work.  We have not been able to achieve the same stellar results yet.  We have determined that the quieter our labs are, the more productive the employees.  Quiet doesn’t encourage small talk or useless banter so more work is completed.  Our efforts to maximize the benefits of active noise cancellation solutions have allowed us to sidestep some of the more difficult to achieve sound attenuation designs.

The vehicle development department has been begging for an anechoic chamber to use for client vehicle testing, but I have been reluctant to provide approval for that project.  It isn’t that I don’t want vehicle development to have all of the best tools to keep our quality of work high, but I’m concerned about the potential side effects.

Someone has to get the car into the chamber and placed properly for testing.  The time it takes to do that and escape the chamber is enough to drive individuals with limited mental fortitude insane.  AcMo’s weak-minded test has some insidious loopholes we can’t seem to fix.  Once the silence envelops someone, it is difficult to get it off without damage.

The spikes look dangerous, but I don’t think they are for the reasons you might suspect.  We’ve had a few people bounce off of them for a while and there have only been minor injuries.  However, it is harder to distinguish the mental injuries caused by the silence, and that is the real danger to those spikes.  You can’t hear them driving you mad.

Testing has proven that too much silence for too long a period can lead to hallucinations and other mental issues.  It is hard to accept this to be true when too much external sensory input has caused problems in AcMo’s halls since its inception, so the opposite can’t be equally harmful.  I won’t accept that.  The only way to know for certain is to build a test chamber and throw random employees in every day for varying lengths of time.

OSHA would object to our methodology if it became public knowledge, but that’s why we aren’t going to tell anyone that we’re using our employees as involuntary test subjects.  They go into the quiet room overnight if they threaten to breach their confidentiality agreements.

The first one lost its torso due to the silence, but I’m certain that won’t happen again.

Once we stop losing employees to the quiet rooms, we can work on creating personal quiet rooms that can be deployed within seconds in any environment.  This would prove invaluable when the street team is hunting for volunteers and appropriate test vehicles in public.