About Grumbling

2 min readMay 30, 2024

Hey there! You might guess this is Mikhail Boldyrev speaking. My colleagues at the office can vouch for this — I love to grumble. On days when it’s particularly bad, I work from home to avoid scaring the designers. But even on regular workdays, you might hear me unexpectedly huff and puff.

The mechanism behind my grumbling is pretty simple — when I’m extremely annoyed, the excess energy comes out of my mouth as disgruntled bubbling or snorting. Metaphorically, I’m releasing extra pressure (or, as another version goes, I’m turning into an old man).

Here are my top 5 reasons to grumble:

5th Place:

The sounds of a wheezing Chewbacca — my reaction to the office coffee maker being turned off (if it’s left idle for too long, it shuts down). It takes a while to turn back on. When I can’t wait, I leave to work and hope someone else turns it on.

4th Place:

I sigh every time after a presentation when I realize that the project’s final milestone hasn’t gotten closer but further away. I love it most when the backlog shrinks, not grows!

3rd Place:

“Ughhhhrgggghh” — a classic combination of disgruntled sounds, my reaction to a broken font library. All because such emergencies aren’t factored into our estimates.

2nd Place:

Overtime/nights/weekend work. No one likes it, but sometimes it’s necessary. I counter my frustration with complex profane sentences filled with plenty of participial constructions. Usually helps.

Winner:

When the number of messages from colleagues and clients exceeds all reasonable limits, and notifications chirp like crickets on a summer meadow. In such cases, a scream like a dying diplodocus escapes.

And now, a classic manipulation for comments: how often do you grumble/sigh? What are your favorite reasons? I hope I’m not the only noisy/grumpy one.

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