My husband collects bottle openers—the tackier the better. And so of course my daughter, Clementine, decided to find him a tacky Irish bottle opener when she was in Dublin last week. And since everyone knows that the best place to get truly tacky stuff is tourist shops, that’s where she went. (I assume she just searched until she found the place that most looked like someone had gutted a family of leprechauns inside.)
Having thus located the perfect store, I think she must have taken her time finding the Very Tackiest Bottle Opener in All of Ireland, because she was there long enough to hear “Whisky in the Jar” several times at least. Clementine is not the biggest fan of traditional music, and so it was in sympathy that she asked the poor shop boy on her way out, “So, how many times have you heard this song?”
In the most morose tone she had heard in all her time in Ireland he replied, “It’s on a loop.”
Ouch. That’s worse than the Christmas music mall workers have to endure. I mean, even as long as the Christmas season is, it does end eventually. Ireland, however, never stops being Ireland. I’ll bet if that poor guy walked into a bar in Dublin and someone started playing “Whisky in the Jar” there would be literal bloodshed.
Clementine’s story reminded me of the time I worked at Snowbowl back in the 80s, back when they still had a shuttle bus to haul people up and down the mountain. Some marketing genius had figured out that the drive up and down Snowbowl Road was the perfect opportunity to subject skiers to a long ad touting the glories of Snowbowl (never mind the fact that if they were on the bus they were pretty much already committed to skiing at Snowbowl). Not to be too obnoxious about it, they carefully layered the Snowbowl ads in between “popular” songs like “Money For Nothing” and “Back in the High Life” (remember, it was the 80s.) Altogether, there were about four songs and four ads during the seven mile drive up and then back down the mountain. Nothing too obnoxious, really, considering the fact that the skiers only ever had to hear it twice a day.
But the bus drivers—oh, the poor bus drivers. They had to hear those songs and ads dozens of times each day, five days a week. In the end some of them just gave up and covered up the speakers. Others gouged out the Snowbowl approved compilation and replaced it with their own tapes, one of the best being a twenty minute loop of “Jahhhhh Love…Ja-ah-ah Love.” Of course my favorite was the one who played Jane’s Addiction at top volume at the end of the day while gunning it back to the bus barn. To this day I can’t hear “Been Caught Stealing” without remembering what it feels like to go into a power slide on Snowbowl Road.
The point is, none of us react well to being forced to listen to the same thing over and over. Which is why I don’t understand how the people who are responsible for making those “Kid Bop” CDs haven’t had to be placed in protective custody yet. Or why groups such as “The Wiggles” don’t have to have plastic surgery at the end of their careers.
Maybe, however, karma is more vindictive than we think. Maybe Christmas mall workers subjected their parents to nonstop Teletubbies, and maybe the Snowbowl bus drivers had played “Another Brick in the Wall” over and over again during a seventh grade field trip (oh wait a minute: that was me).
And the Dublin shop boy? I don’t even want to think about what sin would deserve a punishment like that.