I'm going deaf, sort of by choice. I'm sitting here at my job, and I'm testing the volume output of a Dell Dimension desktop computer's built-in sound card over a pair of iPod earbuds. The output I'm testing with is a stream of an old episode of "This American Life". I know music would probably be more effective, but the familiarity of Ira Glass' voice is soothing, and the stories are distracting, even if neither rises loudly enough to drown out the prattling of my new coworker.
I got in at 8:00, the first one here. I'm on the 20th floor, facing east, the river out the window to my right, the freeway ahead of me to the left, and through both windows, enough of the morning sun is coming in that I don't turn on the creepy flourescent lights.
It's quiet. I eat my oatmeal. I've reduced my oatmeal intake from two packets a day to one. Nature's Path, in the "Optimum Power" flavor. Brown sugar. Walnuts. Raisins. A dash of sea salt. Yum.
I start up the episode of This American Life, and set about eating and working. I have a good 30 minutes of peace before the first coworker comes in. She's cool, though. We say hello, she settles in, and I return to work and listening to the story of one woman's battle against MCI Customer Service. I can relate. Sprint.
Then she comes in, a whirlwind of immediate inane jabbering. It's not just talking, either. It's loud. It begs for attention. It's about things that people may care about, but not when they're talked about in the peculiarly self-centered way she talks about them. Through the steadily increasing volume in my headphones, I hear snippets of complaints about eye shadow, the dearth of sausage in whatever she's having for breakfast (I don't dare take my eyes from my screen after the initial "good morning" smile and nod), despite her declaration yesterday that everything in her house is fat-free.
She puts her on headphones on. This doesn't help. She sings, hums, mumbles, dances, rocks manically in her squeaky chair in ways that would make an autistic five year-old want to slap the crap out of her.
To be clear, there are six of us in a 20 by 15-foot room. The annoyance is three feet to my left, and another coworker sits three feet to my right, spending a good deal of time glaring past me. The other three sit facing the wall behind me.
Her phone rings - Queen's "Fat-Bottomed Girls" - and she answers it. She's prone to taking calls from clients at her desk. She turns partially in her chair, drapes an arm across its back, and faces the center of the room, putting herself on display, because she's certain we're all fascinated by the smart-alecky and condescending way she talks to her clients. When she's done with the call, there's the inevitable explosion of exasperated breath, followed by a loud recap of the conversation for everyone in the room.
She's starting to remind me of the character on "Lost" that I couldn't stand from her first appearance. She's neither a trigger-happy angry ex-cop, nor someone I want to see in a bikini. No, she mainly just makes me wish for a similar ending to her story.
Last night, I finally got to the episode from two seasons ago where they killed off the one character in question. I had accidentally seen the death foretold in a Wikipedia entry, I saw the episode was coming up, and I have to admit, I was excited about it. There's a theory the character was killed off because the actress was a problem, and that a drunk driving conviciton was the final straw. Like we need more good reasons to have stiffer drunk driving enforcement. I watched her get summarily shot last night, and went to bed with a warm and satisfied feeling, completely unconflicted and remorseless, knowing that her scowl and inexplicable behavior will no longer plague either the other characters or my future viewing marathons.
I should be clear that it's not that I'm hoping for my coworker's death, at least not all of the time. I don't even want her fired, because maybe she does her job well. But my total immersion into hours and hours of a television series has disconnected me just enough from reality to believe that maybe, just maybe, some writer will get a call from the producers, and just... write her out of this series. Maybe The Others could be encouraged to come abduct her. Maybe she'll build a raft and float out to try to find shipping lanes. Or, maybe she'll wander off into the jungle, get lost(er?) and take up residence with a howler monkey that won't mind her so much. Maybe when she gets really annoying, he'll put a couple of seashells over his ears and wish they could put out just a little more volume.
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