Tips for Office Life

By Evan — — Culture

Rules for the promotion of greater office harmony:

  1. If you decide to listen to iTunes at the office, make sure that you plug your headphones into the correct jack on your Powerbook.

  2. If Rule 1 is not in effect, make sure that it takes less than thirty seconds for the thought to cross your mind, “Hmmmm, the sound is weaker and tinnier than I expected. I wonder if it’s coming from the built-in speakers?”

  3. If neither Rule 1 or Rule 2 are in effect, make sure that you are playing something relatively hip or inoffensive. Which is to say not the high-pitched screeching of “Owner of a Lonely Heart“.

On the plus side, many of my coworkers who share their iTunes libraries have the same execrable taste that I do. Which means I can listen to Erasure or Alphaville or whatnot without actually having to buy those tracks and pollute my own hard drive. Excellent!

9 thoughts on “Tips for Office Life”

  2. UNLESS — when you start singing, suddenly the lights go down, a disco ball descends, the instrumental part of the music swells up from nowhere, and all your colleagues jump out of their cubicles and busting out funky dance moves.

    This means that you are either in a whimsical romantic comedy, or Hell. Possibly both. Either way, I say you need to roll with it.

  3. Wait, there are other people in the world who listen to Alphaville? (I own five of their albums, including two that were never published in the US.)

  5. Yes, the genes clearly win out.

    I am sure there are other people in the world who listen to Alphaville, they’re just wise enough not to admit it in public.

  6. Although, Auros, I hear they’re really Big in Japan! Thank you! Try the veal!

    I can’t believe I missed that one the first time around. You handed me an easy layup and I just bounced it right off the rim…

  7. *facepalm*

    Incidentally, I just finished up my final project for Stats class last night, and it was about how to use χ? tests to make inferences from distributions of heritable phenotypes, to the underlying genetic model.

  8. Ev–I did the same thing many moons ago…with the soundtrack from “My Fair Lady”…ouch. The whole office knew I had the musical tastes of a blue-haired grandma named Bernice.

  9. Yikes! What you do in that sort of emergency situation is:

    1. Remain calm.
    2. Close your eyes.
    3. Make the “devil’s sign” with your right fist.
    4. Start headbanging and rocking out.

    This will guarantee that no one will ever bring this issue up again. At least not to your face, anyway.

Comments are closed.