Today has been a busy day for me.
It is now 2p.m. I’ve been at work since 6. I haven’t eaten anything, my back is aching, I have a headache, and people just are not cooperating with me while I’m trying to make my deadline for the stories I’m writing. (I’m a journalist for a weekly newspaper.)
Desperately trying to wrap up a piece on the ins and out of honoring the American flag during the Reveille and Retreat ceremonies - a story that has taken far too long to write and came down from the very top of the totem pole - I sit at my desk, frustrated, tired and with a hundred things bogging me down.
I lift my trusty tape recorder and listen, for the tenth time, to the brief comments by a private on how honored he is to perform these ceremonies. His voice is muffled, and I think my batteries are beginning to die. The jackasses in the next room are chatting away loudly about college sports, but I’m used to that and I can pretty well blank it out.
The kid’s voice goes fuzzy again and I have to stop and rewind. I hear something that sounds almost like music.
Too busy, I say to myself. Ignore it.
I click ‘play’ and start to listen yet again, my ears perked like an old beagle’s as I strain to decipher what I’m hearing on my tape. Grinding, whining music interrupts my thoughts.
I grimace, stopping the tape and going back again. I imagine I look like the guy in “Scanners” whose head blew up as I reach with every iota of my above-average hearing to figure out what the fuck this kid is saying.
And then there I am; lying in my grandparent’s living room as a boy, bored on a Saturday afternoon and watching the tried and true last resting place for piss-poor TV: The USA Network.
Shaking my head, I snap back to reality and glower around the near-empty room. I stop the tape and rewind it again, and I hear it … and stop to listen for the first time.
I take the headphones out of my ears. Tilt my head. My jaw drops open.
The woman sitting across from me appears to be playing a game. An internet game, the likes of which I have not had the time or pleasure to indulge in since the days of Elf Bowling and Frogapult. I hear the music on this game.
It is the theme to Airwolf. And it is played on a kazoo.
Too tired to be as angry as I want to be that I am grinding myself away here while she idles her time away playing internet games with distinctly offensive accompanying music, I simply say, "Do I hear “Airwolf?”
She chuckles and says, “I’m playing a game. I didn’t realize what the music was.”
I stare at her for five seconds. She sees me and turns down the volume on her computer.
I sigh and go back to killing myself with work, knowing I shall have to endure Airwolf disrupting my concentration for days as it drills tiny holes in what remains of my psyche.
I hate work.