Faith and Begorrah! Me Poor Ears!

A couple of months ago, I got my own office under cartoonishly ridiculous circumstances. So now I'm all the way down the hall from Joe, which sounds nice in theory, but it seems like he's in my office now even more than when I was next door to him. That's mostly because the back-up computer was moved to my office. We really only use it if we need to scan something (which is maybe twice a year) or if we need to pull a job off of--or put a job onto--the archive. By the way, Joe dubbed the backup drive "Hogwarts", which he thinks is hilarious. Anyway, no sooner had I sat down in the new office, Joe's in here saving old jobs to the archive and checking every ten minutes to see if it's finished. I told him I could check for him, so he doesn't need to come down here all the time. The estimated time to finish downloading was 40 minutes, so coming in to see if it's done every ten minutes just seems pointless.

That computer also has the scanner, which we very rarely use, but when I first moved into the new office he was in here every morning using the scanner. Why, you ask? Because his wife checked a sock-knitting book out from the library and it was due back soon. I guess she liked it, but didn't want to pay outrageously inflated book-store prices for her own copy, so Joe was scanning the entire book, page by page, to make full-color printouts. You can't make this stuff up.

But I don't even care. Joe is small potatoes. White noise. The thing that's been slowly driving me insane since I moved to this end of the studio is my boss's radio. Her office is right next to mine, and she's a country music fan. And it's on all day.

I don't know a whole lot about country music, but I guess like anything else, it can be broken into smaller sub-genres. As far as I can tell, the station she listens to is soft-rock staples as sung by today's names in country music, whoever the hell they are. So far I've heard country versions of Boyz II Men songs, Eagles songs (which were practically country to begin with so it just seems redundant), Walking in Memphis, that Aerosmith song from Armageddon...it's like they took MAGIC 106.7's playlist and twanged it all up. Oh, and every day at noon they play the Star Spangled Banner, because anyone who isn't constantly waving a flag until they get carpal tunnel syndrome is a Commie bastard who hates our troops.

It's not all national anthems and adult contemporary hits as performed by guys with giant beltbuckles. About four times a day, Kid Rock (Not country!) inexplicably shows up to sing a song about singing Sweet Home Alabama (Also not country!), sampling quite a bit of the melody from Sweet Home Alabama, and, for some reason, Werewolves of London (Not even the same country!!) But I'd cover myself in peanut butter and lie on a fire ant hill while headphones duct-taped to my head play Kid Rock singing about singing someone else's song on a loop for a month if it meant never having to listen to the most annoying, repetitive song I've ever heard. Even more annoying than Move Ya Body. Well, maybe not. But it's up there. And it goes like this:

"oo oo oo oo oo oo, oo oo oo oo oo oo, oo oo oo oo oo oo oooo"

And continues on like that for nearly four minutes.

After hearing it every day for two months, I had to look it up, just so I'd know who to direct my unbridled rage at. It did take a little work, since the wall between our offices absorbed all the audible lyrics other than the steady burst of 19 "oo"s, which came through loud and clear. What is the secret of the "oo"s? Typing a bunch of "oo"s into Google didn't really help. But adding "annoying" and "country song" yielded some results. So, I hereby direct my unbridled rage at Sugarland, and "All I Want To Do." Congratulations, Sugarland, you just made my enemies list.

In other news, I won't be going back to the doctor to settle this whole Marfan Syndrom kerfuffle until next month. I suppose it could be worse. I could have Foreign Accent Syndrome.

Don't laugh. There are dozens of them. Dozens! Did Madonna suffer so kind of massive head trauma we don't know about? I wonder if Trina's got an Irish brogue now, since her little accident. The thing I don't understand, you know, beside the fact that they start speaking in a different accent to begin with, is why they can't just switch back. Have you ever seen a movie where you didn't realize the actor was British until you hear them use their real accent in interviews? Well, if you can "do" an accent, couldn't you just "do" your old voice if someone threw a toaster at your head one day and you suddenly sounded like Colonel Klink?

I'll bet the dozens of people with Foreign Accent Syndrome get asked that all the time, and it probably ticks them off. It's like when you lose something and everybody says, "Where was the last place you had it?" Wow. Why didn't I think of that? Another mystery solved there, Encyclopedia Brown.

Posted in: annoying,songs,weird ailments