"Some things are easy. If your cube mate holds all his phone conversations on the speaker, you can try asking him to get a conference room. I find that they do not retain this request very long, and it is easier to avoid the problem by wearing industrial hearing protectors whenever the ambient bothers me. To be honest, that's a lot of the time, so I wear my hearing protectors at my desk out of habit, at this point.

But that's a trivial issue. More important is when you depend on someone else's work to be done right and on time in order to get your own work done, and it isn't happening. We had several metallographic technicians at my last place of employment. My requests always seemed to be assigned to the one who sent back blurry photographs of poorly prepared surfaces from which I could draw no conclusions at all. At first I thought maybe that type of sample was particularly hard to prepare, so I went to the lab and re-did the work myself to get the data I needed. I had no problems. I took my concerns directly to the technician to try to find out whether it was a matter of training. I showed him my samples and photographs compared to his. He agreed that he would like to watch my sample prep procedure. I thought the problem was solved.

But the next time my work was assigned to this technician, I had the same problem. I asked around with my colleagues and discovered that he didn't do good work for anyone. I spoke to my supervisor about it and he promised to speak to the technician's supervisor, but nothing ever changed.

Finally, I told my supervisor that I was either going to include extra time in the estimates I gave him for projects he assigned me for me to do my own metallographic work, or else I needed an agreement between him and the technician's supervisor that my work would no longer be assigned to that tech. They struck an agreement and I no longer had to work with that technician. I realize that leaves everyone else getting even more poor work from that technician, but I am not in a position to do anything about that. I did everything that I could do in the group's interest, and when that failed, I took a chance on protecting my own interests, and succeeded. I think it is in the managerial realm to reach the conclusion that the department's interests are not served having that technician on board. Maybe someday, that will happen."