Tamarina and I work at a company doing desktop support. All the people at the company are either 1) partners or underlings trying to get to partner hood or 2) their easily flustered admins.

Now, part of our job is to empathize with the clients, and use soothing and calming tones when talking to them since they seem to view everything, and I mean everything, as life or death situations. (If I don't get my old mouse replaced with the new ergonomic one I read about on msn.com, all of my children will die!!!!!)

So add on top of this, we used to have a boss that was also very easily excitable and would interrupt very important, diffucult projects if someone called her directly to ask her for help on something. For instance, if they wanted help on figuring out how to format text in a word document, which is something we are not supposed to be assisting with anyway.

After a while, I became easily annoyed with the over use of exclamation marks in chat or my bosses voice and somehow this developed into the rather sarcastic gesture whenever someone storms into the room with a sense of urgency more befitting the sinking of the titanic or the burning of the zepplin than their forgetting how to increase the brightness of their LCD screen when they are running their laptop on bettery mode.