Earl surprised me this afternoon by inviting me out to lunch. Our usual haunt, a little cafeteria style place on the main street, was closed for the owner’s vacation. So we decided we’d go to that little trendy restaurant across from my office building. Earl had never been there before and he was rather curious to see how it had been doing since opening in the spring, so in we went.
It wasn’t very good. The service was very slow, cold and nonchalant. The panini bread was so hard that I would have been able to smooth out any callouses on the bottom of me feet with it. So we chalked the experience up to “experience” and decided we wouldn’t go there in the future.
However, there was one feature that I did enjoy very much about the little bistro. The bathroom had jazz music pumped into it over an acoustically pleasing Bose speaker.
I find music in the bathroom to be very important. As avid travelers, Earl and I have had our share of public bathroom experiences. I’m not shy about doing what I need to do in a public bathroom by any stretch of the imagination, I just don’t want it to be dead silent in there while I’m going about my business. I need music. Some of the older interstate rest areas are so hollow sounding that any noise you may make in the privacy of your own stall sounds like an announcement of an incoming train in the center of Grand Central Station.
It ain’t pretty.
I hate it when I get settled in any public bathroom after a round of Burger King or whatever and here someone come schlepping in to do their thing. Aside from the “oh my god I hope I don’t make some obscure gay code noise that makes the guy next to me think I’m interested” stress that I briefly experience, there’s that whole “god this is making a lot of noise” stress that could easily be muffled by Muzak.
After all, nothing soothes the soul in the john like a never ending loop of “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone.
