I’m All Ears

Walls Come Tumbling Down

When it was decided at Monday’s meeting that the dividing walls between the three brand new studio spaces in the temporary building were going to be opened up to facilitate more discussion across year groups of students, I had rather mixed feelings. The discussion bit was good, but if the background noise generated by fifty students in one open plan space had been slightly troublesome for the cookie bite ears, the background noise of one hundred and fifty in three conjoined open plan spaces could be somewhat problematic. As is customary during my many moments of internal crisis, a vision of a newspaper headline flashed before my eyes. It was suitably dramatic.

Frightened by what desperate feats of construction I was capable of after this premonition, I made an immediate and impassioned plea for a rethink on the knocking down of walls. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, but the concession was that a movable structure would be provided to act as a sound barrier during testing moments of inter-studio noise interference. I await with interest…

Hearing Aid Room 101

This week’s episode of Wonderstuff on BBC2 gave me a well-timed reason to count my acoustic blessings. How about this for a hostile office environment for the hearing aid user: the Jeyes Toilet Testing Facility, aka Flushing Meadows, where Jeyes test their toilet cleaning products.

Apparently there are over 200 lavvies wired up to a computer, which commands them all to flush simultaneously at predetermined intervals. Ouch. I’ll never moan about a rumbling air vent again.

You can see it in action on the BBC iPlayer at around 3 mins in to the episode.

The Best Laid Plans

“Excuse me,” I said to the latest man with ladders to arrive in the new office, “do you know what this vent is for…can it be turned off?”

It was the small square vent directly above my prized new desk space. I had been told that it was no longer in use when I was hatching my Machiavellian HOH seating plan, but it seemed to have come to life.

“It’s an extraction fan for next door,” said the man, “it’s got to be permanently switched on. Building regulations.”

“…It’s just that it’s making a really annoying rumbling noise”, I said feebly.

“Aye, kind of goes right through you, doesn’t it? It’s really loud from where I am”, came the reply.

The man was 12 feet away from my desk, on top of his ladders. Worryingly, he was enthusiastically exposing an additional hole in the ceiling.

I gulped as I realised that my colleagues, who had been denied the nice window seats because of my desire to flee from amplified traffic noise coming through open windows, were now going to have their brains drilled by a rumbling air vent as the consolation prize.

As I looked at the latest shower of plaster dust on the carpet, the man descended his ladders and tucked them under his arm.

“We’ll soon have this air conditioning working again!” he said cheerily.

New Office Checklist…With Hearing Aid

If the decant manager showing the woman with the hearing aid her new office thought she was a little uptight, even odd, he didn’t show it.

“So, as you can see, you’ve got great views from these windows”, he said, “you’re here first so you can bag this space before everyone else! They’ll all be jealous!”

The woman didn’t seem that interested in the view.

“Do those windows open? Is that the motorway over there?” she interjected, fiddling with her ear. After an affirmation on both points, she had lost interest in the windows entirely and was now turning her attention elsewhere. “Is that an air conditioning unit up there?”

She pointed to the ceiling.

She was told that it was but it wasn’t currently commissioned. “Good”, she said, even though the ambient summer heat seemed to be bringing her out in a visible sweat. As she set about scrutinising the location of the only power socket next, she seemed to be inexplicably pleased that it was right next to the door, at the back of the room.

“Can you ask them to put my desk right here”, she said.

“This office is a lot bigger than the old one, isn’t it!” said the decant manager cheerily, noting her strange request. He’d have had the nice window seats like a shot. The woman gave him a strange look before striding alarmingly towards him.

“Eh?” she blurted, “What was that you said, sorry, I’m a bit, er….”

The decant manager repeated his quip, even though it had now lost a little of its spontaneity. The woman laughed in agreement and said she was glad she’d got in first to bag the best seat. The decant manager was puzzled, but went along with her enthusiasm. They said their goodbyes, but just as he opened the door to leave, she called him back.

“What’s that up there?” she said anxiously. She was pointing to a small vent in the ceiling above her prized new desk space. “Does it make a noise when it’s on?”

“No, don’t worry”, laughed the decant manager, “it’s not making any noise, that system’s been decommissioned”.

“Phew”, she said, “For a moment, I was worried it was all a bit too perfect”.

X-Ray Exposé

“What have I done to you!” I said with remorse to my little beige friend as I Googled ‘hearing aids and X-rays’ after I unwittingly subjected it to a series of dental X-rays last week. It turned out to be a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

‘Do not wear a hearing aid when having medical diagnostic procedures, including X-rays, CT scans or MRI scans’, warned the search results almost unanimously. The only exception was a lone abstract from an academic paper entitled ‘Dental X rays found to have no effect on hearing aids’, but it was written in 1986 in the pre-digital era and some of the contributors had mighty strange names. Could I, MR Dancer, trust DL Armbruster and JS Laughter? Could the whole X-ray thing just be over-cautiousness on the part of hearing aid manufacturers as JS Laughter et al inferred? Or was there actually a real possibility of a ‘very unusual accident’ as one of the hearing aid vendors in their study implied?

I concluded that if there was even the remotest possibility of a ‘very unusual accident’, then I would be a very likely candidate, but exactly what kind of accident were they referring to? Perhaps it was not the hearing aid which had been in danger that fateful evening in my brother’s surgery…perhaps it had been me! Shit. I pulled back my hair and examined the back of my ear for fatal radiation burns in the shape of a Siemens Chroma S. All seemed perfectly normal, but I still couldn’t get a vision of the ghost of Marie Curie out of my head. She was Googling my posthumous paper entitled ‘Digital hearing aids act as a deadly magnet for dental X-rays in people with cookie bite hearing loss’. I needed bona fide authoritative clarification that I was going to live. Quick.

‘Why should I not wear a hearing aid during X-rays?’ I asked Google.

‘Why should I not wear a bra to bed?’ popped up in the search window. Damn those search engine predictive algorithms. I was momentarily sidetracked by wondering why anyone would want to wear a bra to bed, since I can’t wait to get out of mine at the end of the day, but I soon regained my focus. I hurriedly re-entered the intended search query and hoped that my internet browsing history would never enter the public domain at an employment tribunal.

I scanned the search results and was rewarded with the shock news that ‘Subjecting your hearing aids to X-ray technology may cause them to malfunction’.

Well at least the lead coffin was off, but what about the hearing aid malfunction. I needed more precise information. Was it the kind of malfunction that could lead to me occasionally picking up Radio 2 and taxi control centres? I reckoned I could live with that. Hopefully it wouldn’t be the kind of malfunction which would cause the hearing aid to pick up the sound of every whirring fan within a radius of ten miles, that would drive one mad…oh, wait a minute.

‘What kind of malfunction will X-rays cause to hearing aids?’ I asked Google impatiently. I was getting right fed up by now.

‘X-ray radiation (e.g., CT scans, MRI scans) can cause interference and stop the device from working.’ came the reply. ‘Remove hearing aids and keep them outside the room during these procedures’.

So there you have it folks. If you don’t want to waste your life Googling your mistakes retrospectively, just take the damn things off when you’re having an X-ray, as your long-forgotten hearing aid manual advises, and hope nobody says anything important until you’ve put ‘em back on again. Simple.

Update 21.07.11: The Siemens Chroma S appears not to have come to any harm despite undergoing 4 dental X-rays in quick succession.