Project 289 - Day 51 : iPod Therefore I Am

I read an article a week or so back about how noisy the 21st Century is, but being a city dweller of long standing, and obviously inured to the cacophony around me, I dismiss as the ranting of a whiner.

Not so today. I stand humbled and corrected. For today, I not only had to put up with a car alarm wailing like an endlessly bad piece of electronica (and trust me after 6 hours, we could actually singalong to the 'notes' of the alarm!), and an owner in a nearby building clearly deaf to the sound of his own car alarm (wow, great investment mate!! Someone could be stealing it, and you would blissfully on, unaware of the loss of your car), but they decided to test the fire alarm.... again.

Yes apparently running it for the fire drill the other day wasn't enough. It seems that someone decided that two days later, something about the alarm may have stopped working - trust me, it hadn't! (at least I could to say 'Emergency' with the deep baritone voice that accompanies the alarm) - and so they needed to test it again. To top it all off, a colleague down the open plan cubicle forest decided that bursting bubble wrap was a fun way to spend a few minutes.

Thankfully through all this, and endless bus and train journeys, my iPod was there, filling my ears with the sounds of Kaz James (great music - listen to him sometime!), and other artists, and blocking out the ugly sounds of modernity. It did mean putting the Blackberry right in front of me so I could see it ringing, and looking around a lot in case someone was trying to talk to me (yes I did my best gopher impressions, for which I won Best Gopher Impersonator at the Cubicle Theatre Sports Championships in Boise, Idaho, in 2006.... alas there's no such thing but how cool would it be if there were?!), but that was a small price to pay for sweet notes instead of raucous, unending ear-splitting noise.