A thing to which one gets accustomed, when one is the extra guy traveling from office to office: they are slumlords when they seat you. If there's a place available for you to sit, every person that comes in every day has considered sitting in that place, and said "pass". The reasons why are varied and interesting, and I am always relieved when the reason is one that makes me less cranky than it makes them.

Across the five-foot divider from where I sit is a different department entirely, with a different entrance into the cubicle maze. The occupant of the desk on the other side of the divider has spent hundreds of hours within eight feet of me, but to my knowledge, we have never laid eyes on each other. I'd only recognize her walking by if she happened to be carrying her music around.

Through some combination of headphone inefficiency, consideration deficiency, and naked sociopathy, her music fills a fifteen foot radius of where she sits. That girl likes to crank it up. Her kind of music is the kind that is, in essence, some technological implementation of a metronome, with repetitive howlings layered over repeated rhythm hooks. The kind of music that really makes you twitch on the fourteenth playing if you're not into it, and trying to do something else. The kind that leads to thoughts you'd rather not have.

Hey, hey; you, you.
I don't like your playlist.
I think you need a new one.
I could kill your playlist.

Those sorts of thoughts.

I'd think I was being hypersensitive to my environment (as is the way of my family) were it not for how the people in "my" department behave when they walk around to visit me. (Oh, yeah, there were no seats available in "my" department, so I sit alone, giving me plenty of "out of sight, out of mind" time. Plusses and minuses there. But anyway.) As people stand near my chair and speak, their eyes go to the source of the thumping, meet mine in confusion and sympathy, and then they stutter a little bit trying to get their thoughts back on track. Yep, there's no polite way to make the problem go away. Any good thinking I do there happened in spite of it.

I think I do good thinking here, and I ascribe great credit for this to the excellence of my antidote to this problem.

About the time I arrived at where I now sit, I was made heir to a collection of CDs. I had spent many joyful hours with those CDs as the backdrop, but never actually knew what was on them - it was a trade secret of the lady on shift, and certainly in her top three professional assets. For reasons I found murky and disturbing, she quite suddenly had no further use for them or the place where she'd worked, and the word was sent back that those should go to me.

I'm pretty sure that she just didn't want to touch anything that was in there, and that she'll simply make new ones as needed. But still, it was touching to have my interest remembered, as she swayed into the sunset, having done all she could do in that town.

At the time they were handed to me, it was the most heart-shattering thing anyone could have done. I showed flickers of emotion. In front of men with whom I was about to drink. I still can't talk about it.

Still - it's been a positive thing, having those songs. They had seeped into my subconscious as being part of a happy time. Not only does hearing them give me irrepressible traces of that good-music-bounce-sway, actually knowing the titles and the bands has added a new fascination to the songs. How can I not love having a song entitled "We're Computerizing and We Just Don't Need You Anymore"? How can I not ponder the meaning of the name of the band Red House Painters: communist, or simply specialist?

With these and other audiovaccinations on my side, it's a joy to survive what my slumlords have done unto me. If bad music comes my way, I can armor up and rise above the problem, faster than the columbine falls off in frost.

With all this on my side, I feel no need to be cranky. I consider that covered, most excellently well.