Wednesday, 30 January 2008

Where's Miss Manners when you need her?


Here’s a question for the Miss Manners/Emily Post's amongst us: What is the etiquette when it comes to singing in the shower in a public place? No, its not me doing the singing, as most of you know my singing voice is registered with the UN as a Weapon of Mass Destruction, this is something that's come up at the gym. This is the same gym that has signs on the wall of the changing room asking that there be no nudity, how you achieve that in a shower/change room I can’t imagine, but moving on. The story goes like this; when I go to shower after I finish my workout there's often a woman singing in her shower cubicle. After several weeks I've noticed that there are two different shower singers and I have to say, they are the yin and yang of vocal ability:

Singer 1 - this woman has got to be a pro, she has a fabulous voice and I’ve stayed in the shower too long some mornings, almost turning into a prune, because I've enjoyed listening to her. She occasionally sings some jazz standards and sometimes other songs that may be Hindi, I can’t understand a word of those but I don’t care, she’s got a great voice. She could sing a commercial for laxatives and it’d sound good.

Singer 2 - this girl couldn’t hit a note if it came out and hit her first. She repeats the same line of the song that is her chosen victim for the morning over and over again, each time with different notes, all wrong, then hums, then la-la-la's, all off key, then silence, thank God the aural torture is over, but no, away she goes again. This morning we suffered through “lalala - hum - lalala - love and peace - hum - love and peace - hum”. Love and Peace? Like hell.

So, I guess this is a similar situation to that of passengers being able to use their mobile phones on planes. On that topic, can you imagine the 14 hour flight back to Sydney, trying to sleep while some dickhead talks loudly to his mates in another time zone (Look how important I am) or some bimbo shrieks down the phone to her friends about her new shoes. I predict an outbreak of a new crime “Aviation Phonicide” where the victim is found in a plane toilet with their mobile phone shoved down their throat (or somewhere else depending on which disgruntled fellow passenger gets there first....)

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