Division of Spousal & Relational Conduct
Case BIC-SRC-4794
Status: Open; no external complaint on file
| Complainant | The resident |
| Subject | The same resident |
| Nature of complaint | Volume of own chewing, hard foods |
| External complaints on file | None |
| Reason for review | Sound considerable from within; reach to others unestablished |
Summary
A resident has filed a complaint regarding the volume of their own chewing. Hard or shelled foods — nuts, crackers, apples, ice — produce, inside the resident’s head, a noise out of all proportion to the act: a single almond registers as a structural event, an apple as a sustained one. The resident hears all of this at full volume. No one nearby appears to react, and the resident cannot tell whether the sound is contained within their own skull or whether those present are merely being polite. The resident is left with what may be a private catastrophe and no way to learn whether it is also a public one.
Particulars
1. The sound is felt as much as heard — in the jaw, in the ears, and somewhere behind the eyes. Ice is the worst. The almond is merely the most frequent.
2. No one nearby has complained. The resident does not find this reassuring. It may mean the chewing is inaudible, or it may mean those present are being polite, and the resident cannot tell which.
3. Chewing more carefully produces only a more careful version of the same uncertainty.
4. The resident has considered simply asking whether the chewing is too loud, but recognizes the question would draw more attention to it than the chewing ever could.
Finding
The Bureau is unable to process this complaint. To establish how loud a resident’s chewing is to others, the Bureau would require the resident to be someone else, which exceeds its authority. The matter would ordinarily fall under the ambient-disturbance framework (Policy 8.4), except that framework requires a disturbance someone has reported, and the only person who has reported this one is the person causing it.
Standing advisory
The resident is advised that the noise is real, is substantial, and is — on the available evidence — occurring almost entirely inside their own head. Whether it reaches anyone else, the Bureau cannot say. The resident may continue eating, at a volume that is, to the resident, considerable, and, to the room, unestablished.