I used to work for a company where the employees were seated in rooms divided by plaster separation walls. One day, a rather senior manager left, and as a parting gift, bought a snooker table to his now ex-employees. Unfortunately for me, the table was placed right in front of my face, with just that plaster wall separating us. The noise of people shooting balls was not that much of a distraction, but once in a while a ball would roll to the side close to me, and a player would try to hit it, and on the backswing would hit the wall - boom, a vicious kick at the wall bare inches in front of my face.

I tried talking to them, to no avail: they would say they’d be more careful, and they would - for a while, but then would forget all about it in the heat of a game, and I’d be jumping out of my seat again, all concentration gone.

Enough is enough I said, and one day, when everyone was gone, lowered the adjustable legs of the table on the side further away from me - just a couple of revolutions, but enough for the ball to prefer that side. From that moment on, most of the balls ended anywhere on the table except near my side of it, but not conspicuously so, so the players never suspected anything, and the kicks in the wall have all but stopped.