Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Ringing in my ears

We had a winner in the “please beat me to death as I am so stridently annoying I must be killed” sweepstakes. We have a number of doors in the building where I work. I will do my stewardess impersonation for this - We have exits at the rear of both hallways as well as exits here and here and here and here.

We have a lot of doors. If one needed to flee from this building and did not? It would not be the building fault, the only problem might be that the flee-r could be over whelmed by the choice of possible exits and passed out from having to make a choice of so many possible options.

Not all the doors are created equally. Not all the doors come equipped with door bells – although most of them do have bell boxes. Strangers coming to the building never use the doors that do not have bells. How do they know? You can’t tell when you walk up to the door whether or not it has a bell, you really have to look and despite the fact that we have many doors, from the exterior of the building they aren’t really close to each other. We have one door that remains unlocked during the day and nobody uses it. The front door, the big entry door, right in the front of the building, the one that looks like you should use it, But no, when all else fails, when the bells go answered, they go bang on the sealed door that doesn’t even have a door knob and hasn’t been in use since the Eisenhower administration.

So. The sweepstakes had started. The bell is ringing away and since it is not sounding directly over my desk, I am not answering the door.

And it keeps ringing. I ignore it.

And it’s still ringing.

Ring! pause, RING! pause RING DAMN IT pause and by this time there are people in the hallways checking doors and trying to figure out where the ringing is coming from. We are not successful.

We could have gone down to the end of either long hallway and explored the possibilities that the ringee was not at the closest doors. We could have. We didn’t. I am sure however that we “looked” down the long hallways and failing to see someone standing directly in front of the doors, decided there was no one there.

Ring! pause, RING! pause RING DAMN IT pause

Now, if you were expecting a delivery of some sort. You had asked someone to bring you something and you were waiting for that something and you heard a door bell ringing, would you not think “I wonder if that could be my Thing I asked for and am expecting? Hmmm, could that be a possibility? did I tell them where my office was and which door was the closest to it, Hmmm? But more likely what I am waiting for will fall from the sky, through the ceiling onto my desk. Yes, that sounds probable.”

If you thought this way and you ignored the Ring! pause, RING! pause RING DAMN IT pause? You would be the winner of our “please beat me to death as I am so stridently annoying I must be killed” sweepstakes.

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