Workin' in a World of Men – Buddy

“We tell you what's cool, then play it 'til you like it!”

So I work with Buddy. Buddy listens to the same shit radio station every goddam day. Modern Rock. Fucking garbage, blasting me in the face at full volume, 7 hours a day, five days a week. Thank god he comes in an hour later than I do. Thirty five hours a week I'm forced to listen to the same irredeemable audial waste over and over and over and over and over and over. It's like I'm living the movie 'A Clockwork Orange', only my ears are pried open and someone's pouring shit in them.

Chimpanzee mongoloids call in to this station asking them to play songs that are going to play twenty times every single goddam day like clockwork anyway. The bands all sound the same, like a runny shit sprayed into a Marshall toilet bowl turned up to eleven. Like Nickelback. Even the band names sound the same. Theory of a Dead Man. System of a Down. Three Doors Down. Three Days Grace. The announcers are churlish simpletons with barely a basic grasp of current events, or even their own native tongue. The callers are backwards ball cap wearing armchair athletes wearing UFC shirts who love the Tragically Hip because they sing about hockey and one of their songs mentions a stripper. The advertisements paying for it all are the root of man's inhumanity to man, as well as one of its most potent examples.

So Buddy listens to this torturous affair every goddam day, and I suffer through it every goddam day. Why suffer, you ask? Because Buddy is one of those special individuals you meet who just will not accept that not getting his way is any kind of option. Resistance is futile. One of my co-workers epitomized it with this anecdote: arriving to the job site before Buddy, he turned on his own music. When Buddy arrived and assessed the situation, he BUILT A WALL BETWEEN THEM to block out the music so he could listen undisturbed to his usual shitsong caterwaul. You'd get mighty tired fighting that battle.

So Buddy and I are working together on the roof, and I suddenly notice that I haven't heard any of the usual crap coming out of the radio. In fact, I hear reggae and rap. WTF? I wonder. I ask him what's up, and he tells me he's hooked up his iPod to the stereo. I tell him that's great because even though the reggae and rap he's playing are not my favorite things to listen to, I hate the shit radio station he usually plays. Next day he comes in, blasts his diarrhea rock music station at max volume on the stereo, and listens to his iPod with headphones on all fucking day.