Even the damn motorcycle horns and the stupid doorbell that rings inseccantly all day get to me now. In the Kemang and Mampang area, a lot of those sate sellers traded in their voices or wooden bells for a battery-powered buzzer of sorts. Traditionally, they would just yell their commodity while pushing their wheelbarrow around (where they store everything they need to cook), but now, it's either not loud enough, or they just simply became lazy about yelling all the time. So now, they attract attention (and wrath) by pressing that buzzer every so often, guaranteeing attention from a 200 m radius. And it drives me crazy.
Since the receptionist at the office left, they installed an additional thumbprint lock on the outer door, which had a doorbell function, and there would be an alarm if the door was left open for more than 1 or 2 minutes. Now, the doorbell sound itself is very annoying, not to mention the fact that it's either me or Okta (in the cubicle next to my office room) who opens the door for whoever comes. I really hate it. The doorbell sound has a sort of forced attention-getter property to it, and I simply cannot ignore it. I have to go to the source and make it shut up somehow. Now get this - the doorbell can hardly be heard from outside the outer door, making a lot of the stupider guests press the doorbell more often without any sort of politeness. This gets me on my nerves even more.
Then, if some idiot leaves the door open on the spring-hinge, the alarm will go off. Now when the doorbell, as annoying as it is, is still a two-note lower frequency sound... the alarm is a high-pitched repetitive sound! And to add to that, the lock mechanism for the door is a bit faulty, so at times the lock just simply doesn't work and the door alarm goes off on and on and on until somebody comes and tries to fix it. Here's the punchline: as my office is nearest to the door, the speakers for this unhuman contraption are right next to me (well... about 2 metres from my door). I swear the speakers are mounted in my direction or something, because it certainly feels that way. Now imagine trying to have a conversation on telephone or typing some document that needs concentration while the stupid alarm goes at least once every 10 minutes!
When I am able to escape the office, I have to face those loud motorcycle horns, those car alarms, those purposely loud mufflers (notice the contradiction in terms), thus I can never escape the sounds that make my brain so unsynchronized.
And I bet the dear readers of this blog have read how crazy work has been the past few weeks... thus... I must be going out of my mind as we speak. Well, almost, and I need to do something about it quick. Work is neverending, so I'll have to just drop everything and try to alleviate this stress somehow. It's either a holiday, or I need to invest some disciplined time to curing the stress step by step. No, not dining out anymore. Yoga, perhaps? Midnight bike rides would be nice... if I didn't have to worry about the random drivers that roam the roads of Jakarta... playing music? It's a job now! Well, almost...
Gym helps, and the basketball sessions help.. but there needs to be something more. Maybe more blog writing? More purposeful, scheduled blog writing? I think that's the main difference between now and a few months before...
So here I am again :).
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