I complained in my last post that the other staff in the store get annoyed if I put on ambient music when I want to chill out a little. The final straw was last week on (thankfully) a pretty quiet day when I turned around to ask a colleague a question and realized that they’d disappeared. Read the rest of this entry »
read comments (0)The Silence of Sound
Posted by Speranza in Work
Since I was a kid I’ve always been very uncomfortable sitting and working in silence. When I did homework I always wanted music playing in the background, and I even prefer to fall asleep to the sound of a radio or a CD.
At work we have music playing all the time of course, and by and large we all agree on what should be playing. None of us have particularly extreme taste, so there’s rarely any death metal, or Bolivian goat herding chants, or Mantovani on the sound system. But recently there has been a source of dissent for at least some of the staff … chill, or ambient music.
It has pushed me through my writer’s block and the words are now just flowing out of me like there’s no tomorrow. I’m following the advice of the guy who programmed the site, and putting the writing aside for a few days in order to let it sit. He suggests that writers need to separate the process of creation from that of editing, so I don’t really know yet if what I wrote is going to be of any use to my novel.
Write Darn It - Write!
Posted by Speranza in Work
Sometimes I think the most challenging part of getting work done is just that … actually getting the darn work done. Today for instance, I have a to do list that is just begging to get finished but I can’t seem to summon up the focus and energy to do what I need to do.
It is obvious from the name of this blog that I spent a fair amount of my working life as a waitress. I moved on from this illustrious career some time ago, and I have finally come to the point that I once again enjoy eating in restaurants.
For a long time, I simply didn’t eat in restaurants at all if I could avoid it, because I had become so familiar with the skill of waitressing that I found it very frustrating to simply be a customer. I have a friend who originally trained as a theatre director, and he similarly finds it very difficult nowadays to go and enjoy a play at the theatre. Instead of relaxing back in his seat and watching the show, he is constantly looking with both a critical and an admiring eye at many of the technical aspects of the show. And for a long time I had the same problem going to restaurants.
The Working Life
Posted by Speranza in Work
Despite the name. I am no longer a waitress, although I still am quite spacey. I now own a small music store in southern California. We’re one of the few remaining independent stores in a world that has largely been taken over by the chains, and we have a loyal but slowly dwindling customer base. It is becoming more and more pointless for us to try and compete with the big chains for brand new CDs by very popular artists so instead, we started to narrow the range of styles that we carry, and to deepen the stock within those styles.