Times When Headphones are Important

Scene: Barnes & Noble cafe. Quiet section, filled with readers and people diligently typing away (or more likely screwing around on Facebook) on their laptops. Yuppie crowd is full of people wearing thick-rimmed glasses, indoor scarves, and fitted t-shirts.

I walked into Barnes & Noble, immersed myself fully into the pretension of my environs, and proceeded to read The House of Morgan, a book about the meteoric rise of the Morgan banks.* It was interesting stuff.

* Nine-year-old Aaron wants to give me the beatdown for getting into stuff like this and calling it interesting. But if we got into a fight, I'd definitely win. At 9, I weighed 60 pounds. Seriously, it wouldn't even be close.

Just then, a confused-looking man walks in, sits at a table, and immediately loads YouTube onto his MacBook. After fielding a few phone calls and completely spoiling the plot of the new Sherlock Holmes movie for me,* he proceeded to begin loading videos for his enjoyment.

*His quote: "I liked the movie, thought Robert Downey was great, but I knew that the ******** was the villain the whole time." Thanks man. Seriously.

He watched videos - at full volume - for about three minutes, much to the chagrin of a group of timid yuppies who needed a hero. It was my time.

I let fly a couple of stifled coughs and gave some dirty looks, but apparently this fellow was oblivious to subverted social cues.

So I did what I had to do. I walked up behind the guy and watched the video over his shoulder, chuckling at appropriate moments. It took him a shockingly long time to realize what I was doing, but then he responded as expected: "What do you think you're doing?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. If you don't want us all to watch your videos, then maybe you shouldn't make all of us listen to them."

Scene: As Aaron returns to his seat, a bald 22-year-old with thick rimmed glasses and scarf, reading Kurt Vonnegut and a book about veganism, places his hands together, bows and issues a mock applause. The day saved, Aaron does what any superhero would do. He sits down and reads about early 20th-Century bank deregulation and its affect on the global commodities market.*

* Just like the Punisher would have done.

Please Enjoy the Music While Your Party Is Reached...

No I will not.

This seems like it would be a neat idea.* It really does. Instead of listening to a phone ring, all of your friends can listen to some top 40 song while they wait for you to answer your phone. It's an idea that the Verizon dude with the glasses came up with when he wasn't stalking some chick with 800 of his friends. The dude overhead in the helicopter is a co-conspirator.

* False.

First off, I don't like that song. No one does. I promise.

Secondly, and less forgiveable, the sound quality is just atrocious. It sounds like someone took a shower radio, put it in the shower, ran the shower, activated the shower radio, then absconded some sort of crappy tape recorder, circa 1992; placed it under the sink, (ran the sink), and hit record. Once recording was finished, they dropped the tape in the toilet, recovered it, then sold it to Verizon.

Verizon then played the tape back in one of those real old MACs with a cassette drive, plugged one speaker into the audio port and the other into the printer port, placed the computer and speakers in a post office box near the airport, placed earmuffs on a microphone, then held that microphone up to the window of the plane as they rolled past the post office box.

Then they made it play in my ear.

I'll stick with texting.