6/12/2005 05:38:00 PM|||James O'Malley|||

It's been another busy weekend of revision work. I'll have been in paid employment for 23% of my weekend. This compares to 3% of my weekend watching Doctor Who (I watched it twice). Point is, work was as awful as it always is. Actually, slightly worse.

For months, the music played in my place of work (I don't want to name it so head office can google for it, and find me criticising them), was always the same "wallpaper" music. It was like someone had taken the most bland and dull pop records of all time and thought that it would encourage consumers to buy things they don't need. The playlist was somewhat limited... but maybe that's because all of the songs sounded the same.

A few weeks ago, shock horror, the playlist changed. In tune with the current trends, it was a slightly "rockier" sounding playlist. Wasn't as bad... there was the three recent Green Day singles. Unfortunately, this is offset against Will Young.

But wait, there's more! At work yesterday, I discovered the music has changed again! It's now an incredibly upbeat "collection" (and I use the term losely) of classics (again, used losely). The size of the playlist is worse than ever- on Saturday during my eight hours, I heard the song D.I.S.C.O (no idea who it's by) no less than FIVE times.

It's all played out from head office down what I'd imagine is a broadband connection. In other words, the music's probably just glorified Winamp and Shoutcast. There must be around an hours worth of music on there, on a loop.

The interesting thing is that whenever Amarillo comes on, the whole shop lights up and even the customers start singing. I don't. There's nothing more scary when the store manager is trying to encourage a "sing along", clapping and singing away at the top of her voice. Thankfully, this was upstairs in the staff-only area, as opposed to in full view of the moronic masses.

And why, why oh why is Y.M.C.A on there? EVERYONE hates it. It's played at every sort of "disco" (that I've been to, so the sample size isn't massive), and nightly at holiday parks... how much commission must the Village People be getting? I bet the builder is currently working on another wing of his house.

Bizarrely, along with all of these "party classics", as the album of the store may be called, is the Nirvana classic, Smells like teen spirit. I don't know enough about the song to know what the presumably positive message is, but it breaks up the tedium a bit.

I'd comment on some more songs- but I think I've mentioned almost everything. It really is ridiculous. I'd liken it to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib, where the American army forced the "terrorists" to endure hour after hour of crappy music, an an attempt to break them.

Are my employers trying the same thing on their staff? Regular customers wouldn't notice as they're in and out in a flash (with my fast tillmonkey skillz anyway). I think one day in the near future I'm going to collapse or tell my supervisor all of my terrorist plans, or whatever.

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