04/07/03’s illustrious band:

BC’s Earplugs

Brought to you by BC. I heard this story over Christmas out west, so please forgive my tardiness in passing it along.

Once upon a time, BC and her husband the Legal Eagle decided to treat themselves to a rock concert. Having learned a lesson from their misspent youth, they also treated themselves to a pair of earplugs apiece to make the experience less dangerous to their hearing. They enjoyed the concert, extracted the earplugs and came home feeling pretty pleased with the whole experience.

As a few days went by, however, BC noticed that the hearing in one ear seemed a little dim. She used a Q-Tip to check for wax and other debris, but found nothing. Being a speech pathologist, BC is well aware of the importance of good hearing to good communication, so she made an appointment to get her ears checked right away.

The nurse at the clinic took a look inside BC’s ear and stifled a giggle. Soon she had extracted the rest of an earplug that had torn off from the original wad and gotten tamped even farther into the ear canal by BC’s probing.

BC reported feeling more than a bit sheepish, as she often lectures the schoolchildren she teaches about not sticking things into their ears. To make matters worse, the young nurse was a former student of BC’s (and a classmate of my own Sister-san, as it happens), so she knew BC should have known better.

Still I’m a big advocate of earplugs myself. I work in an open-plan cube farm at Media Headquarters, and things can get a little loud in there despite the white noise machine. Keyboards clatter, phones ring, conversations gain volume, and the next thing you know, the woman across the hall is shouting the F word at recalcitrant pressmen on a conference call. So I get out my industrial earplugs and retreat to my own personal cone of silence for tasks that require particular concentration.

Since my Award-Winning Magazine recently published a story on the dangers of too much background noise, I feel well justified in plugging up. But you won’t catch me stuffing them too far into my head.

E-mail the Media Sensation: jugglernaut@hotmail.com