In-depth astrology discussions, right outside my office door. Complete with testimonials to how truthful and awesome astrology is and, when someone explains that astrology is bunk, knowing glances and quick statements that of course he'd say that, he's a taurus.

KEITH SMASH.

Co-worker whistling along with Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, not on headphones.

Gum chewing, gum popping, audible leg jiggling. Endlessly.

No tales here - throw a paper airplane over the wall at coworker next time he sings along.

Rachet it up from there....ballistic missiles as last resort.

No cubes but our office walls are thin enough that I can hear the guy in the next one argue with his wife on the phone a good four or five times a day.

The guy who formerly held my job was notoriously foul-mouthed and ill-tempered, which combined with a highly anal/retentive personality, created almost daily outbursts of shouted profanities. This mostly amused my coworkers and me, but it got to be quite embarrassing when we had outside visitors into the office and it would continue unabated. When that guy was finally canned, it was like a pall was lifted and the mood of the office was greatly improved.

In an office full of chatterers, there was one who put the rest to shame. No subject was too inane for her to prattle on about. No hint obvious enough for her to get. We had a system in place whereby whenever we saw one of our co-workers trapped by Mighty Mouth, we'd call them so they could pretend they had Super Urgent Business to attend to and could not possibly continue the conversation. Until the day that she decided to just sit on the floor and wait for me to get off the phone. She stayed there FOREVER and when she finally got up, it was to go across the aisle to my friend's cube...who happened to be the one who had placed the emergency phone call. Then she sat on the floor and waited for him to get off. She ping-ponged between the two of us for what felt like hours, while we were trapped in a crazy nonsense conversation.

The only thing worse than that was the time I had to share a room with her on a business trip. I could not escape. If I told her I was going out to grab something to eat, she tried to talk me into eating the half sandwich she had saved from lunch. If I told her I was going to use the pay phone to call home, she insisted I use the phone in the room. And she snored like an angry asthmatic bull. Dang.

I used to have a coworker who liked to lurk around in our offices. He had pretty much no social/conversational skills at all - it was more like he was lonely. He'd just stand there, silently, until you acknowledged him, no matter how long it took. At which point he'd probably say something really weird and then stand there. One time I tried to ignore him completely and, rather like jrossi, I was emailing with a coworker across the hall, taking bets on how long he'd stay there. When I finally turned around, about 10 minutes later, it turned out that he wanted to show me his fancy new phone. "It gets weather reports from around the globe!" he said happily, and then he proceeded to stand there for another 10 minutes, reading the temperatures of all these major cities. "Helsinki, 34. London, 53. Buenos Aires, 74." and so on. I came really close to losing it completely and falling off my chair laughing.

There's a new employee in the department we share office space with, who seems very friendly and has adorable clothes (very cute 1940s librarian/Stop Staring! sort of vibe), but laughs like a whooping gibbon.

Oh. My. God. I've truly never heard anything quite like it emanate from a human throat. Closing the door to my office and turning up the Paul Weller (natch) to 10 does nothing to drown it out. It's like being trapped in a goddamn monkey house.

at least your cube neighbor made an effort to sing. there was a dude in my office who used to sit there all day long and do this weird scat-singing thing - "la da da deet deeeee... aah, ya ta ta tA TEEEEE! YEEE ladayadayada FAAA!"

one day i got sick of it - i turned my speakers toward his cube and started playing sunn0))). i'm not sure if that had any impact or not - he did something to piss his boss off a few days later and ended up out on his ear.

(actually, the scat singing wasn't as annoying as his feeble attempts to discuss current events with me - "hey, did you watch glenn beck last night?" [shudder])

Oh, god, my cube neighbor whistles the two opening bars to the theme from Doctor Zhivago. That's it--the same two bars, over, and over. Oh, sometimes he jazzes it up, lingering on the high note, but it's always, ALWAYS, the same two bars.

*shamefaced* When I'm grooving on data entry, I'll sing along to my music. And I listen to Irish pub songs now and then, which means that I also stomp my feet and play drums with my thumbs between keystrokes.

I keep telling them to move me to my own secluded area, but noooooooo....

I don't know if you ever saw this old thread of mine about my co-worker Hobbette.

We had a former employee who would make strange, mewing sort of noises as he walked past you. We'd call him "MeowMix" when he wasn't around. You just could not have a conversation with the man. If you tried, he'd just look at you, and repeatedly say "So, do you like this? Do you like this? Do you like this?" There were other phrases, but they escape me at the moment. He eventually got in trouble for making the teenage girls very uncomfortable with his comments on their clothing.