The Soundtrack to my Résumé

I always have a song in my head, so the music I listen to is very important to me, because it determines what I will be listening to when the music is turned off. Sometimes it is good, like Life on Mars? or Don't Look Back in Anger or Magnet and Steel. Sometimes it is bad, like Radar Love, or the little pre-commercial NFL fanfare, or the Sid the Science Kid theme song.

Right now, I have Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind in my head, and I'm not happy about it. It came on while I was driving back from the Children's Museum. WBRU, I expect better from you. Anyway, I freaking hate that song, not on its aesthetic merits, but because I was forced to listen to it eight times a day during the summer of 1997.

Ah, 1997. Ryan Seacrest was just a smarmy DJ on L.A.'s Star 98.7. It was the summer after I transferred out of Brown, the summer before I started classes at Art Center College of Design. The summer I had to make some money. The summer I signed on with a temp agency. I landed a six-week assignment with an insurance company, which was great, because it was a nice long stint of guaranteed income. When it became clear that it was basically going to be six weeks of stuffing envelopes, I wasn't thrilled, but I was sure I could find a way to survive the drudgery. When the workplace turned out to be an office full of catty women whose main pastime was gossiping about whichever coworker had just left the room, I vowed to tune them out and carry on. But there was a conspiracy afoot. A sinister plot devised to make me crazy. A scheme that could only have been perpetrated by the likes of Ryan Seacrest and Third Eye Blind. And the person in charge of choosing the radio station at work.

You know how a lot of soft-rock stations advertise their no-repeat workday? Yeah, Star 98.7 didn't have one of those. They were interested in playing the Top 40 Adult Contemporary Hits of the Summer of 1997, and that's all. The thing about Top 40 hits is that there are forty of them, pretty much exactly. And if you hear them over and over, every day, for eight hours, five days a week, for six weeks, the math comes out to... let's see. I have the equation here somewhere. Oh yeah. It's:

[(2x/3)*240t] = whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

I still get twitchy when I hear Sunny Came Home. Oh god. I'm getting all PTSD right now, even thinking about it.

And then the six weeks was over, and I started school and listened to whatever the hell I wanted while working my ass off to get my degree so I could eventually work at a place that played cool music. I'm still kind of waiting to see how that works out. At my first real job, I could often hear Radiohead coming from one guy's office, so that was cool. And then I think they started piping in classical to see if it would make everyone swear less. My next job had no music, maybe because if you don't play music on the office, you can classify everyone as independent contractors and not give them any benefits. Then I had a job doing decorative furniture painting, and that really had its ups and downs. Usually, we could listen to whatever we wanted to, which included the soundtrack to Hair, all the awesome stuff on my iPod, and a CD of college fight songs. Huh. But these were vetoed during the holiday season by the back office manager -- I'll call her Pat, since that's her name -- in favor of a radio station devoted to playing all Christmas songs all the time starting the first week of November and ending after you go clinically insane. It really gave Star 98.7 a run for its money, repetition-wise. Also, Pat really enhanced the experience for all of us by humming along to every song, very loudly and badly. I pointed the humming out to a coworker who somehow hadn't theretofore noticed it, and she never liked me much after that, but I was glad to have some company in my misery.

The job after that had OK music. Turns out Muzak actually plays songs you've heard of now, with words, in their original recorded form. There was 80's music occasionally, but too much Coldplay in the Adult Contemporary playlist. And John Mayer McCheese. Oh, and You're Beautiful by James Blunt. Man UP, Jim. I'm sorry if you like any of these things. Reallllllllly sorry.

And now, my current job. Chauffeur To and From the Children's Museum. I was somehow transfixed by Semi-Charmed Life, and listened to the whole thing, but then turned the radio off and listened to my usual soundtrack these days, which is two people in the back seat saying Mommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeee over and over in weird voices for no apparent reason. So the repetition thing hasn't really been resolved, but at least now I can join in and start saying Mommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeee as well (much to the delight of my deejays, or office managers, or whatever their titles are) and mix things up a bit by making everyone laugh.