Headphone Fun

I like to listen to music at work, but I work in a cubicle environment. Ultimately, that means I have to wear headphones in order to listen to music. However, I also work for a large enough company where I work with lots of other people. It's not uncommon for someone to stop by my desk to ask me a question, or for me to have a discussion with other people in my cube. So, I have to make it easy for people to get my attention, even though I wear headphones.

My usual answer to this dilemma is to only use one side of the headphones. The particular set of headphones I use are of the over the head style, so I simply just brush one ear pad back so that it doesn't cover my ear. That way, I can still listen to music, but I will also be able to notice if someone calls my name or otherwise tries to get my attention.

My coworkers have noticed, too. One lady noticed when she walked by, and she commented that she thought it was a good idea. I hadn't really thought about it much at that point, but I was pleased to hear that someone thought it was a good idea.

A while after that, though, a different coworker noticed it and the conversation went a whole lot differently. First, she noticed that I only had one ear pad over my ear, and commented on this. In fact, she asked if that was a new style or something. After I finished laughing at the idea that I was that trendy, I explained my whole reasoning for this. I also threw in the tidbit that I will usually favor uncovering my left ear, since I wear an earring on that ear, and it feels a little weird sometimes to put on that particular ear pad. In hindsight, that was my mistake.

That quickly led to a discussion about my earring. The lady commented on how it looked, and then quickly followed that up with, "I wish I could wear earrings." I noticed at that point that she didn't have any earrings on, and I couldn't remember ever having seen her with any on. As it turned out, she had a metal allergy that prevented her from wearing earrings (the metal in the fastener was problematic for her). By this point, though, our conversation had attracted some attention, so a couple of other people joined in.

For some reason, at this point, I remembered that tattoo ink often has heavy metals in it, so I asked the lady if that also barred her from getting tattoos. Her response was classic. She basically replied with something akin to, "maybe, but I don't know. At my age, I'm more worried about it sagging or looking funny. Screw that." This was when the rest of the peanut gallery chimed in, with lots of nodding in agreement occurring at that point. I probably would have commented at that point, but I was a little too busy laughing.

At this point, everyone was pretty amused by the whole exchange, and there were quite a few smiles all around. The story didn't end there, however. I was so amused by the whole thing that I posted a quick Facebook status update about it. The problem was that I wanted to lump the whole thing into a single status update, so in trying to be concise, I mentioned both earrings and tattoos in the same sentence. I didn't think anything of it, but a few hours later, my brother sent me a text message asking if I had any tattoos that he didn't know about. An hour after that, an unrelated friend also commented on that status by expressing disbelief that I had any tattoos. Oops.

I cleared up the confusion with both my brother and my friend, but it caused me to chuckle just a little bit. At that point, that was the cherry on top of this whole headphone interaction. The whole thing had made me laugh from start to finish, and I can't help but think that I'm going to be reminded of this whole exchange just by putting on my headphones. Work is going to be just a little more interesting at this point, I think.