Confession: I have a nasty habit of gnawing on headphone cords. Enough of that abuse, and I’ll sever the wire. I have done this twice now, once with the ones that came bundled with my old nano, and again with some cheap-o set that I think Becki got free in a back of AA batteries.

This time around, I picked up a set of these, on the same trip to the Apple store where I bought a keyboard (I don’t know why I bought the keyboard, but I have to say the decision has worked out pretty well), because I figured that if I shelled out for something a little nicer, I might not try to eat it.

I didn’t like the things at first, because you have to cram them well into your ears to keep them from falling out, and even then they tend to wiggle loose at the slightest provocation, but they’ve grown on me. The in-ear design blocks out background noise by acting as an earplug, and sound quality is good enough for me. I suppose it probably isn’t up to Audiophile snuff, but I have a lot of CDs I ripped in 128 kpbs MP3s before I knew what VBR was, so I doubt that the headphones are the real bottleneck here.

Anyway, the point of all this is that when I’m listening to music above a certain volume, I can’t hear a thing. Since I’m usually hunched forward staring at my monitor, I can’t see much of anything either. Neither would be bad by itself, but taken together, I end up in my own little world, completely unaware of my surroundings. The building could catch fire and I might notice before the sprinklers went off, or something killed the power.

Which is pretty much what I was doing this morning, when a bunch of IM windows started blinking at me, and I finally noticed a couple of people waving at me.

Apparently, they’d been trying to get my attention for a while, and since I wasn’t responding, half the people in the room started waving and yelling at me to see if I’d notice. Then, in a space of 11 seconds, I got the following messages:

“Earth to Greg”

“hey greg look up”

“GREG!@” [sic]

The interesting thing here is that these were all from different people.

This is not the first time this has happened - sometimes the guy who sits right across from me, facing me, six feet away, has to IM me if he wants my attention. Other people come up right behind me and tap my chair*, which scares the crap out of me

*This is totally unrelated, but I love that chair - I managed to upgrade from the regular office chairs we have to a spare Aeron floating around the office. Best. Chair. Ever.

So yeah, I am totally, embarrassingly, out of it sometimes when I’m working. But I want to thank (blame?) Apple and their earbuds for that, at least in part.