Headphones | Wait until next year

Tag: Headphones

The invention of the Walkman facilitated the end of the social society. Or I’ve read something along those lines, anyway. It is easy to blame some technology, rather than ourselves. Blaming someone else is easier than blaming ourselves. Blaming something inanimate is even easier. Anyway, I like wearing earphones while I’m out and about. It means I can give everyone around me a visual cue that I’m anti-social without all the effort of actually being anti-social. It is a passive form, rather than the aggression of the Loud Person On Phone. You know not to disturb someone with earphones or headphones, if there is someone else nearby to pester who isn’t plugged in. I like that barrier, that shelter.

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November 27, 2012

Working Sounds

I’m not sure how I feel about noise in a working environment. This morning, for instance, I have been disrupted and distracted by a colleague playing Michael Bublé’s Christmas hits at high volume, another colleague’s mobile phone squawking out a rather tinny rendition of something by Led Zeppelin, the constant chug of the photocopier, the initial sniffs of someone’s winter cold, plus your usual conversational hubbub/general non-specific office noise. I’m grateful that there haven’t been any especially loud phone calls, nor the bizarre, inexplicable exclamations to nobody in particular that sometimes emanate from certain staff. Read the rest of this entry »

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