I have discovered that having the radio on in the office is really distracting. Especially when the radio station in question is one of those annoying “lite” stations that thrive on the likes of Delilah at night and play boring, down-tempo tracks 75% of the time and then claim to be all fun because they play “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” every Friday at noon. Unfortunately I have no choice in the matter: the station is selected by someone else and is pumped in over the intercom speaker.
I think the fact that the sound is barely audible and coming from a very low-fidelity speaker is part of the reason that I find the noise to be so distracting. I can’t quite figure out what song is on unless I take time out of whatever I’m doing to actually listen to it and then it usually turns out to be a really crappy song. No offense to Elton John fans, but how many times can you listen to “Candle In The Wind” in a given week? Every morning between 8 and 9 they play a Sheena Easton song, yesterday it was “Morning Train”, this morning it was “Modern Girl”. I dare them to play “Sugar Walls” tomorrow. I’m betting it’ll be “For Your Eyes Only”.
So I have installed a program on my work computer that gives me a wide selection of background sounds to play at my desk. Today I have been lulled into relative peace with the sounds of “Rehobeth Beach”. It isn’t just the sound waves crashing against the shore but it’s actually the Atlantic crashing against Rehobeth Beach. Now mind you, I’ve never been to Rehobeth Beach so I can’t verify the authenticity of this claim, but nevertheless there it is and quite frankly, while it’s quite pleasing it doesn’t sound much different than the waves at say, Marblehead, Mass. or somewhere along the coast of Nova Scotia for that matter.
I am enjoying the distraction from the distraction of the radio though. I like to think that the Rehobeth Beach sounds actually kept me calm as a woman called in a with a trouble because she was unable to open an attachment on her e-mail from a Prince somewhere in the Middle East that promised her a huge sum of money if she told him where to deposit it. Apparently she thought that the attachment provided the proper forms and documentation and any guidance from me wasn’t going to help matters, she just wanted to open the attachment.
I told her to take her computer to a specialist.
You know what’s odd, is that in spite of the fact that I like music, I don’t like it….I find it disrupting, annoying after a bit, and if it’s too loud…there’s no way I like it. It makes me edgy and irritated (and god knows I don’t need that). Plus, for white noise, we have this lovely fan in our room that make sleeping that much more sane.
I have had to have a fan on when sleeping for as long as I can remember. I used to have to have the fan blowing on my face, but now I’m content with just the noise from it. And like you, I feel pretty much the same way about music these days.