I swore I wouldn’t. My days in Finance were over. But my former company had an issue. They lost some critical filings with a server crash. Being that I only own Macs, I needed to go into a local facility of my former company, borrow a PC and begin recreating the lost work. It would take someone else many days to complete, only hours for me.
Sitting in a foreign cubicle farm, noisy at that, was difficult to concentrate, and this work was going to be tedious. Especially since the brain cells involved in my former life were happily being converted to much more pleasurable uses over the last few months.
Damn, there was a lot of chatter going on around me. Fortunately, I was able to pop my AirPods in, and play some classical music thru my iPhone. As the morning wore on, and I started making progress in the increasingly distracting work area. I switched to some Stevie Nicks and turned the volume all the way up to drown out the last of the nearby babble.
Almost finished… and someone tapped me on my shoulder. The EHS manager who had lent me the computer, checking to see how it was coming, and perhaps seeing if I wanted some lunch.
I reached for my AirPods, removed them from both ears, but Stevie Nicks kept singing… and oh so loudly. I pushed them in my ears, then pulled them out again. Same song playing, just as loudly whether they were in and or out. I asked, I am sure in an entirely too loud voice, “Do you hear that?”.
I saw him mouth the words “Hear what?”
Oh no! What was going on. In and out of my ears I kept moving the AirPods. Was some part of them stuck deep in my ears and somehow still playing? Studying the AirPods closely, they looked fine. Was something wrong with my ears, my brain?
Holding the AirPods in my hands, Stevie Nicks blaring in my ears telling me that “the rooms are all on fire”, I yelled, “Do you have a plant nurse?”
Into the hallway we went, the confused EHS manager, and me, also perplexed, but now getting a bit panicky. Down the hall, turning, down another hall and around the corner. There sat the nurse. Dressed in a blue and white trimmed dress, young, blonde, her hair like Alice in that old Tom Petty music video “Don’t Come Around Here No More”. I loudly explained, competing over Stevie Nicks pounding away in my head.
The nurse smiled, and soothingly said, in between songs, “Now think back, what were you doing this morning, before you came here?”
“Umm, I was relaxing by the lake, listening to the surf….. No, wait, I was laying in bed, it was dawn, my wife was still sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her so I put my AirPods in and …. oh Gawd!!!”
I reached up with my right hand, felt the AirPod in my ear, laying on my back, still in bed. I was waking from a dream. Stevie Nicks was still singing, life was perfect, it was going to be another beautiful day.