The '05 Repentance Tour
I’m on a Repentance Tour through every fault of my own. Of course the disclaimer is that one man's suffering is another's light burden, but there is a kind of irony to it that I - as an appreciator of irony - can appreciate.
Mine is a voice that carries or so it's been said; I cannot testify. But at work in the days of yore Ham o' Bone and I would hold forth on politics, religion & sometimes work at a pitch just shy of deafening. Of course we were unaware of this despite people telling us. Some sort of amnesia prevented the message from Carole & Debra from getting through. "Quiet!" they’d tell us, and quiet would we get, suitably chastised until the morrow when we'd have to reinvent the wheel of not annoying people.
So – fast forward – Bone is gone from the workplace. Every day the harshest voice known to mankind complains in the most complaining manner five feet from my cubical. To say her voice carries is to say that men like sex. They call the justice poetic but I see no poetry in it.
She's higher in the corporate foodchain so I buy earplugs that are of surprisingly small avail. I soon recognize that if a twenty decibel reduction in sound would suffice then I really wouldn’t need them, would I? Only fifty decibel reduction plugs would do and I know not where to purchase them. You can’t stop a jackhammer with a thimble.
The moral of the story? I've had a taste of my own medicine and it's not as sweet as I'd imagined. I'm now a literal interpreter of the phrase "what goes around comes around". The ability to concentrate is contingent on environment and my environmental destructiveness has come back to haunt.
No comments:
Post a Comment