I’m very particular about music, so working anywhere with piped-in music drives me crazy. I worked at a vet clinic that would usually have the adult contemporary station on, and every f#@%ing day they made sure to play the Sugar Ray trifecta of “Every Morning,” “Fly,” and some other shit song I’m trying not to remember.
Hah.
Hah, I say again.
Hahah, in fact.
It’s a supermarket chain in the U.S., owned and operated by the UK supermarket chain Tesco.
You have my sympathy. If you love music, it’s utter torture to endure 8 hours a day of enforced, repetitive crap. But look at it this way, Stan, your life is probably miles better now than it will be for that little stretch after November 25th.
Full disclosure: I quit my bookstore job because I couldn’t bear to listen to Sting’s John Dowland lute dirge one. more. fucking. time.
My dentist’s office is a three-man operation in a quaint old house in the village. They must all be edging toward retirement age by now. They always have the radio tuned to I don’t know what station, that plays music suitable for a nursing home. For a nursing home in 1950. Never heard such ‘soothing strings’ and 'syrupy melodies" but I’ve been hearing it there for the last 20 years and I doubt they turn the station to Urban Contemporary when I’m not there.
At a Chinese buffet restaurant I ate at three weeks ago, the piped-in music was Auld Lang Syne, repeatedly, for over 45 minutes. In mid-April.
I have worked in places where there was continuous low-volume white noise piped in, to defeat eavesdropping devices. It sounded like there were leaky steam pipes all over the building. Most people got accustomed to it quickly, but once in a while there would be someone who would be driven bat-shit insane by it after about a week.
I’d take the white noise over Muzak any time. Nobody would listen to Muzak on purpose, so why would people want it in the background? I’d rather listen to the HVAC equipment than an all-woodwind version of the oeuvre of Richard Marx.
Back in the late 1970s, I used Amtrak to travel back and forth between UCSD and L.A. For a notably brief period, they played a Muzak-like mix in the coaches that seemed to turn over about every forty-five minutes, then repeat, ad nauseam. You notice I said “notably brief”–enough people must have complained that the misguided experiment was soon ended.
Has anyone stayed at the Luxor in Las Vegas recently? When I went there for my honeymoon, back in 2001, they played the same 3 or 4 songs over and over again in the lobby. The two songs from that rotation that come to mind are “You Sing to Me” by Marc Anthony and some alt-rock piece of crap whose title I forget, but which contains the lines
There’s a restaurant down the street
Where hungry people like to eat
I just Googled the lyrics out of curiosity, and found out it’s “Pinch Me” by the Barenaked Ladies. Sorry, BNL fans, but I just don’t like this song, because it reminds me of sitting around the hotel lobby, bored out of my skull, waiting for my new husband to come out of the men’s room so we could go play the slots or something.
Back in the day, I worked at a student snack bar/soda fountain. I am SO grateful to the kid who hacked his turntable into the PA system (yeah, as in playing vinyl LPs). Now, he only had a couple of albums, but they were good ones.
It’s a tribute to Abbey Road that I heard it a million and a half times, and it still holds up.
Well, whomever got paid to come up with the name should be fired.