Work-life balance, which in prior years of my career was carefully filed away with conceits such as friendly leprechauns and heart-healthy bacon, has been abundantly available these last 18 months. With this abundance comes a shortage of late nights in the office, a scarcity I’d gladly embrace any day. All that said, though, there are some nights when you’ve got to pay the piper. It’s just the nature of the beast, you know? It’s especially the case when the beast in question is the Internet, for which no “off” button has been devised yet.
Tonight was a late night. You know the contours, I’m sure, starting with a gradual filing out of your co-workers, followed by the arrival of the cleaning staff, and then, finally, solitude. There’s always this slight twinge of desperation before the last person leaves. It feels like you’ve missed the bus, or maybe everybody else is in on a joke that cruised right over your head. After this twinge subsides, you settle into a reflective mood, scored against a backdrop of silence.
No chatter. No drone of central air. The only thing audible, in fact, was the subdued clacking of my keyboard, punctuated by brief barrages of mouse clicks. And you know what? I wanted to punch myself in the chest. How did we become this, I wondered? I was certain, at that very moment, that the click may be the most noncommittal sound in the world. Then again, given our current trajectory, we may soon be swiping at screens with our pointer fingers in complete quiet. I longed for something more substantial, like the carriage return of a typewriter, or the banging of a mallet. Anything, really, to remind me that I’m more man than mouse.
ISFX. Those were the four letters that rolled off the conveyor belt the first time I took the Myers-Briggs test, more than a decade ago, one evening during my sophomore year in college. I remember being particularly pleased with the “X.” It felt like I had defied the test, you know? What it meant was that I had scored a dead split between Judgment and Perception, which put two archetypes on the table: I could be an Artisan or a Guardian.
It wasn’t like I had my pick, I don’t think. I mean, personality is innate, after all, and if I were able to switch between two types at will, some prescription meds would’ve been in order, never mind a stupid little test. Still, I think it was the option that pleased me. This was a far cry from the career evaluation I had taken in grade school, a Scantron affair that had summarily declared chemistry would be my life’s calling. I’m pretty sure I took that career path out to pasture when I got a D- in Chem 103. Did you know, though, that you can spell “concubine” using elements from the period table? I bet you did not.
Last week, I took the ol’ Myers-Briggs out for another spin. Could a decade change a person, I wondered? It just might. My new letters are ENTJ. No X-factors this time, no hedging. A Fieldmarshal! That sounded pimp, frankly, and the fact that I could evince the “charm and finesse of a world leader” or “the insensitivity of a cult leader” made it even better. Now, part of me knows this test, grounded in science as it may be, might not be all that different from the “Which Harry Potter character are you?” quiz. But even if this Wikipedia entry fails to serve in a descriptive capacity, perhaps it can shoulder a more aspirational one. And in case you were wondering, I’m Harry Potter.
When I’m in the driver’s seat, I normally go about my business with the radio turned off, focus trained solely on the road, the only soundtrack furnished by ambient traffic noise. When I’m in the driver’s seat of my cubicle, however, I’ve got Pandora on full blast as a kind of workaday Moses, shepherding me through the grind. Or I did, at least, until this Monday, when I decided to stop cold turkey.
Why? I think my hearing’s gotten worse, ever since I began this musical odyssey six months ago. Back then, I was sporting a pair of low-end Altec Lansing earbuds I had procured, free of charge, about seven years ago after I filled out a form on the Internet. These earbuds were my conduit to Pandora, where I was slowly building up my “musical DNA,” which apparently is a hodgepodge of Jack Johnson, DMB, Ben Folds, Jet, Bowling for Soup, SR-71, Green Day, Cardigans, Sum 41, American Hi-Fi, and, Lord help me, Blink-182. “Lord help me” is an aside, by the way, and not a band.
It wasn’t my choice of music that did me in, however, nor was it my audio equipment. I mean, in terms of taste, I’m clearly never going to a meetup of, say, Pitchfork readers, where I’d likely be reviewed, then summarily executed. And you should know I discovered, one December afternoon, that my Altec earbuds were highly magnetic! I was absentmindedly jamming the two earbuds together, when I noticed they repelled each other. In effect, then, I had been administering a steady, months-long regimen of magnotherapy directly to my skull.
But I don’t think my hearing went downhill because of these factors. No, I’m blaming it on the sweet-ass pair of Sennheiser bass earbuds I purchased back in January. At the time, I had viewed them as an investment: if I’m on Pandora for hours on end, why shouldn’t I upgrade to better hardware to deliver these phat beats directly to my auditory nerves? Well, now I know why I shouldn’t, because prolonged exposure to what are essentially subwoofers in your ears is less than optimal. Now, don’t get me wrong–the quality was top-notch. If it’s a matter of deteriorating one of my five senses, though, I can probably forgo listening to “Jesus of Suburbia” for the twentieth time.