This question is mainly aimed at European (and others who live in places with some kind of 230V 50Hz flavour of mains). Traditionnally, switch start ballasts have been the norm, and are still installed today by people such as Kev. I've seen large rooms full of switch start (which makes an interesting start up show and a cool pinging noise), however they had very good lamp maintenance and I don't remember seeing any lamp at eol even if some starters were relatively slow.

Let's say you have a medium-sized room lit by 16 fittings each containing a 36W T8 lamp on switch start with a glow starter. That room is an office in which 2-4 people work all day. Eventually, a lamp is going to reach EOL. Since there are only 1-2 starts per day, the starters are not worn when the lamps reach EOL. We all know that the lamp in question will flash as the starter tries to do its job. If left long enough, the starter will either burn out or get stuck. My question is how does this go on without bothering the occupants ? I've seen some small stores in which several people work, and some lamps had gone EOL and had stuck starters. How do the occupants tolerate all that flashing ?

Traditionnal installations here in North America had rapid start ballasts and all lamps driven by that ballast just glowed dimly when one of them reached EOL, so this situation does not really exist except in very few cases.

Thanks.

From what i seen they tend to suffer it silently, though it sure drives them mad. Having worked as IT in a company building with multiple offices i would often spot flashing lamps like that, if i could reach the lamp by climbing on top of the wall between cubicles and such i turned the tube in the sockets to disconect it (but leave the tube in the fixture, now since in those troffers the sockets are facing to the side the tube won't fall out) and the users thanked me for that more than once

I think the "silent suffering" is the best term of this. But ironically very often nobody even call the maintenance...
But usually the flashing does not last longer than few days, usually the starter get stuck very quickly (I guess as it is heating up, it become more sensitive for that) and so the flashing ceases.
Few times I have seen the thermal cut-out starters in use.

Quite frequent is a group replacement after the lamps reach certain "age", so lamps practically never reach their EOL to make any troubles. It mostly mean about 1/3 of the life is left with them, but it is still the cheapest way to maintain, mainly when the maintenance guy is not locally available (here you need a special electrical safety certificate even for the lamp replacements in a commercial environment - it is considered as part of the workplace safety). And this scheme have one other advantage: It does not depend, of someone call the maintenance or not...

And in my office the maintenance replace all tubes of the same age (they split the fixtures into groups and keep track of the replacements) once the first of them start flashing or when they reach certain age (that is based on the experience based on the "first flashing" rule). That mean it is quite rare to see a flashing tube there and in my guess the lamps are utilized a bit more than with the previous scheme. But the reason is, the certified electrician is sitting in our building, so he is able to replace the flashy tube within minutes (well, after being notified,...)

At the radio station everything 4 foot is rapid start. We have some F96T12 lamps (6) 1 fixture now is F96T8 HF  and a 1946 preheat half piper over the transmitter with 2 bulbs. I monitor those closely. When I retire, I will relamp that fixture. Right now I am running some of those CXL Topaz F40T12DX lamps in the fixture. i don't trust these for long life. 
NOTHING gets to EOL under my watch. 

Thanks Ash and Medved. Your answers are probably the most likely situations.

Speaking of stuck starters, would a 36W tube starter get stuck faster than a 15 w tube starter, at eol ? Seems to me they would, since the higher current of the larger tube would heat the starter more. I have tried, as an experiment, to get a starter to stick with an eol 15 w tube on 120 volts with no success. I wonder if the 230V mains heat it more as well.

Thanks again.

I did not see with 15w but PL's appear to last way longer than 36w allthouhg the starter in the PLs base is smaller than a S10-equivalent used for the 36w. So i think yes

It depends a lot on starter (some have more or less sturdy glow bottle, some have extra failure modes like Osram's capacitor and some cheap starters glow bottle vacuum loss), tube (T12 tends to stay lit for a while longer than T8 in each flash, over time it accumulates to way different amount of wear of the starter), and still hard to predict since some starters will fail earlier than others of same model

The lamps are flashing few days for ~10hours/day before the starter stuck, so maybe you were not testing it long enough...