From the Desk of Lemming Boy

Okay, great big giant FAIL on maintaining even monthly blog entries, but here I am once again to dispense my philosophical musings upon you, the interwebs masses.

As friends and family are aware, I work in a metal shop environment.  When you get down to it, this means that my day is spent making shit, sitting at a keyboard designing shit, and/or maintaining the various computers around the shop (figuring out why they’re being shitty).  This also means hours-long stretches of rote activity, which in turn leads to a lot of spare brain resources.  Music is, of course, a favorite method amongst many to stave off mental tedium, but in a machine shop it can get kinda noisy, and it’s not always feasible.  There’s only five of us here, after all, and we don’t have a receptionist, so we need to field phone calls, so that rules out headphones.  So what’s left?  I can only speak for myself, of course, but that usually leaves one of two things: Contemplation of the Universe (which gets regurgitated in snippets on this here blog-type thing) or what I like to call the Internal Playlist.

Yep, I’m talking about cranking up the volume on the iPod inside my head.  Some people like to sing to themselves while working away, but in a shop environment with very snarky co-workers (did I mention that two of them are my dad and older brother?), that can be tantamount to suicide.  Case in point: over the holidays, I was working away when I heard this very unpleasant, very unpleasant whining noise.  Generally, we tend to be on our toes where high-pitched noises are concerned (as it usually means something’s wrong with the equipment), so I immediately start scanning the shop, trying to figure out which machine is having a meltdown.  Nearby, I noticed one of our employees doubled over, laughing his ass off.  I gave him my best “WTF” look, and he jerked his head toward the other end of the shop floor, toward our other employee, who turned out to be the source of the offending noise.  Headphones in his ears and happily assembling away, said employee was belting out O Holy Night in an inadvertantly LOUD, off-key falsetto.  When he reached the “o night dee-VIIIIINE!!!” crescendo, I nearly peed my pants.  Five months later, we’re still giving him shit about that…

So, in the interest of self-preservation, I let the music play in my head and keep my mouth shut.  This is all fine and good, until it turns bad…  This takes on many forms, some of which are as follows:

1. It’s a song you don’t know the lyrics to.  There’s only so many times you can sing “blah blah, garble garble, Jumpin’ Jack Flash it’s a gas-gas-gas!” before you start going mad.
2. It’s a particularly annoying song, like, say, the “Heat Meiser/Cold Meiser” song from A Year Without A Santa Claus (which is made worse since it’s pretty short, causing it to loop endlessly…)  You can try to counteract this one by concentrating on another song, but invariably it tends to be an equally annoying song and your agony persists.
3. It’s a song you don’t know the words to which is ALSO incredibly annoying, so you’re stuck with just the excruciating snippet you know (eg: “pa-pa-pa-Poker Face, pa-pa-pa-Poker FACE!”).
4. It’s an instrumental that has one or two actual words in it, which means that you’ll be singing “doo doo doo” to yourself until you get to said words, which you inadvertently sing out loud.  One moment you’re quietly bobbing your head, then out of nowhere…”TEQUILA!”  Congratulations! You’re officially a crazy person.

Oh, the list goes on,   Of course, there are other methods to keep one’s mind occupied (like counting parts, calculating productions times, etc.) but now you’re Rain Man.  The bottom line is that the attempts at staving off death by boredom only leads to madness.  So, I’m trying to be more diligent about coming up with blog material.  This way, instead of a raving lunatic I’ll be a ranting lunatic.  Somehow, that seems better.