Even the calmest workplace can turn stressful when small habits start to wear someone down.

So, what would you do if a coworker’s constant whistling made it impossible to concentrate? Would you keep trying to find ways to block it out? Or would you finally speak up and ask them to tone it down?

In the following story, one employee finds themselves in this situation and opts for the latter when nothing else works. Here’s what happened.

AITA for asking my coworker not to whistle so much?

I (31NB) work in a small building with an even smaller team.

Most of the team members are neurodivergent in some way (several have ADHD; I’m the only one who’s also autistic).

The work environment is very casual, and none of our roles are customer-facing. I’ve been here for three years, and it’s been more or less smooth sailing.

The supervisor has a habit of whistling.

However, due to my disability, I have a lot of sensory sensitivities that require a fair amount of management on a daily basis. Both my manager and supervisor (both 40sF) are aware of this and have said to let them know if I have any accommodation requests at any point.

I haven’t yet because I prefer to deal with it myself. At most, I’ll wear a pair of Loop earplugs or take a couple of quick sensory breaks throughout the day. This has been fine so far and hasn’t affected my ability to do my job at all.

Recently, though, there’s been one particular sound I’ve found especially unpleasant – my supervisor’s whistling. It’s something she’s always done, usually when she’s concentrating or working hard, and I’ve always just tried to tune it out.

Lately, she’s been whistling louder and more often.

But it’s been getting more and more frequent, so that now she’s doing it a solid 80-90% of the time.

It’s often louder than the background music we have playing and usually not in tune with it either, and it’s not just when she’s really concentrating – it’s when she’s just working, or bored, or thinking, or even during meetings when someone else is speaking.

Because of the nature of our roles, I can’t request to work elsewhere in the building, which would be the easiest solution, and Loops actually made it worse because they muffled the background music so much that the whistling became the salient sound and was even more overstimulating.

They tried to deal with it in different ways, but nothing was working.

I tried taking extra breaks to self-regulate, but that was disruptive to the workflow to the point that the person I was working with the other day kept asking if I was okay because I had to keep stepping out.

So I decided to bite the bullet yesterday and talk to my supervisor.

I made it clear this was a situation of conflicting access needs and nobody was in the wrong, and that I was hoping we could find some kind of compromise, like maybe she could hum or sing instead, or whistle more quietly/less often.

The supervisor was very upset by their comments.

She implied it was weird that I was “tracking” her whistling because she’s “always done it this much” and “doesn’t even notice she’s doing it,” then asked if I could do something on my end to deal with it.

I told her what I’d already tried and said I was very open to any suggestions she might have for anything else I could try. She didn’t offer any and just ended the conversation kind of abruptly by saying she would “try” to whistle less.

The vibe was definitely off after that, and it’s clear she’s ticked off about the whole thing, so I’m looking for some outside opinions on the situation.

AITA?

Eek! This sounds like a pretty stressful workplace.

Let’s check out how the readers over at Reddit feel about the request.

It would drive this person crazy, too.

Here’s someone who questions if the story is real.

This is a good question.

For this reader, everyone has a quirk.

She handled it well. Her manager, on the other hand, really dropped the ball.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.