Ah, that's interesting. The waiters do not bother me.
A large component of any "distraction" is psychological, and part of what gets me with people's cell phones in the theater or coming late is the internal dialog that happens after the initial attention grab. So a phone goes on, I notice it, and then I have the internal dialog "Why would they do that? Do they not realize it's distracting? Are they going to turn it off? Can't they live without the phone for two hours? So selfish." so the distraction is compounded and difficult to drown out. Waiters are just doing their job.
I'm a teacher and I have similar issues with kids talking. If I'm speaking to the class, and a kid whispers to the person next to them, it distracts me and I call them on it, I can't just filter it out. But if I tell the kids they can talk quietly while I work on something, i can filter out the distractions without a problem.
I don't think that's unusual, to be distracted, as I said, is a psychological phenomena, context matters. |
