Look at them sitting there, silent and dumb – pretending to work. I despise them for their passiveness, their mute absorption. Like they’re really working - sitting there listening to Britney, Ghostface Killah, KT Tunstall, Miles Davis, god knows what. Working? They’re just having a laugh.
‘It’s part of our job, it is a music website’, they say, tapping their fingers on the desk, singing tunelessly under their roll-up smeared breaths. Idiots.
But, to be honest, I mainly despise them because I can’t join them. If I wear headphones I go mad. I can’t sleep, I become distracted and my life becomes miserable. Believe me, I’ve tried. But the distress it causes, it just isn’t worth it.
In an age where the vast majority of people’s listening is done under ‘phones, I am stuck in the pre-walkman days.
On my way home I think, ‘tonight I will listen to some music, some nice old skool jungle perhaps’ – and I go home and do just that. For everyone else it’s a stroke of the i-pod and they’re away. I’m an audio dinosaur.
There is a reason. I’ve had
tinnitus for all of my adult life, damage to my left ear caused not by sticking my head in bass bins, but a nasty bout of
mastoiditis when I was 20.
It was maddening at first, but as the years passed I got used to it and hardly hear it nowadays. BUT if I listen to music on headphones (and yes I have tried turning the balance to the other ear, it still happens) my brain tunes into the high-pitched sound in my left ear and magnifies the sound many times over, and drives me up the wall. The ENT doctor did explain it to me in technical terms – but the long and the short of it is I just can’t wear the bloody things.
Which means I feel lonely; sitting in the office while everyone else is busy expanding their music knowledge, checking out the hip young bands they’ve read about in London Lite - leaving me with the sound of typing as my only entertainment, surrounded by a sea of faces basking in a personalised audio paradise.
Can you be a music fan in the modern age and not wear headphones? I just can’t put the hours in. I listen to music for about 10 hours a week - about an hour each night, and about 5 at the weekend. It’s not enough. My colleagues must be putting in a good 6 hours before they even finish work…
And it’s going to get worse. With digital download this, bit torrent that, podcasts being beamed up your arse by Stuart bloody Maconie…soon no one will be talking. They’ll all be locked away behind wireless ear buds, grinning to themselves, watching their screen and listening to ‘their playlists’.
You can see where it’s leading. There I will be – god willing - in the old people’s home, gazing into the middle distance, while everyone else is locked into their personalised entertainment systems. No time to talk to me about Curly Wurlys, or who was the best looking one out of ABBA*. They’ll be too busy listening to ‘Great Advert Jingles from the 70s’ and highlights from Eurovision’s of yesteryear. ON THEIR FRACKING HEADPHONES…
*Benny
