The inspiration for this essay comes from today’s Saturday Slant.
No matter how hard you try to be tolerant and patient, there’s that one thing that gets under your skin every time. There’s that one something other people do that annoys you without fail. What is your pet peeve?
I don’t need to be “entertained”. I especially do not need (or particularly want) to be entertained everywhere I go.
Why is it, then, that I have to put up with background music (practically) everywhere I go? It’s piped into the drug store, the grocery store, the hardware store, the book store. Sometimes the music is obviously a tape. Sometimes it’s even recognizable. Sometimes it’s just tuned to a local radio station.
There’s music played when I’m put on hold on a telephone call. (This is yet another in a long list of reasons why I don’t like to do business over the telephone.)
One night, in a hotel room in Washington DC, I listened to an entire CD of Enya before I realized that something had happened to the connection and the customer service person was not coming back… I must admit I enjoyed that particular experience with music on hold; I just kicked back on the hotel-room bed, closed my eyes, and blissed out… I didn’t really come to until the CD went into replay on the first cut 🙂
There’s some kind of music playing from overhead speakers in nearly every restaurant I’ve ever been in. Given that we eat most of our meals “out”, I’ve been in a lot of restaurants.
In some restaurants, the conversational volume is so high that the only time I notice the background music is in the restroom. Two questions come to mind… if no one can hear it in the dining room, why is it still playing? And, does anyone really need background music in a restroom?!
Then there are the places that allow customers to get their hands on the music. Three restaurants we patronize on occasion have (shudder) jukeboxes. At least one of those is fairly large and the music comes over the overhead speakers; also (usually) it’s not very loud. It was much too loud the last time we were there, but the waitress kindly lowered the volume at our request.
Another restaurant is very small and the jukebox is very loud. That would be bad enough, but this place also runs a television and the television is also, usually, quite loud. I invite you to imagine a room perhaps 15 by 20 feet in size, with both a TV and a jukebox competing with each other. I carry 30-DB earplugs in my belt pack; they don’t help.
Now we’ve reached, indirectly, the entertainment evil that I think is worst of all – the restaurant television set. I’m not talking about the TV showing the current ball game up in a corner of the local sports bar. (Is every bar a “sports bar” in that regard?). I’m talking about televisions in “ordinary” restaurants. If people want to eat in front of the TV, isn’t that why the gods created takeout food?
Our favorite diner runs a TV. Most of the time, the sound is low enough to largely ignore. I try not to get sucked in by the moving pictures. Spouse always sits facing the other way. We continue to eat there, regularly, because the prices are good, the service is great and the food is excellent (by far the best we’ve found anywhere). A TV is a small price to pay… although we try to sit as far as possible from the idiot box on weekday mornings if it’s airing court TV or (shudder) a “talk” show (people yell a lot on both of those).
The Mexican place with the jukebox and the TV is the only one that plays the television at full volume — usually a Soap Opera or a ball game. There’s a TV (sound muted) in one of the Chinese restaurants we eat at regularly, another (also muted) in the sushi bar of our favorite Japanese place. I can name several other restaurants that regularly run a television, generally with the sound turned way down or off.
Often, a restaurant with a television plays background music too. It’s all very weird, and unnecessary, in my mind.
Background music can be more than a minor irritation, if you consider the store’s side of things.
Spouse and self have made the decision to leave stores many times because the music was getting to us. There goes the sale… We used to eat at the Mexican place with the TV and the jukebox a couple of times a month (they do the best chile verde burrito). But I’ve finally said “Enough!” and we won’t be eating there anymore; we may occasionally get takeout. There goes a regular customer.
I go to a restaurant to eat and (often) converse with Spouse and friends. I go to a store to shop. If I want to listen to the radio or play a CD or watch television, I have all of these available at home. At home, I can choose the programming myself.
I don’t need to be entertained whenever I go out of my house. If I want to go out for entertainment, there are hundreds of choices. Given the choice of a concert or a grocery store for music, the choice, for me, is obvious.
Slightly Off KIlter 
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