Gotta Love Gatekeepers

I’m working on night replenishment in a supermarket over the Christmas period, which mostly involves getting as much as possible of the last delivery of the day and the multiple overnight deliveries of chilled stock onto the shelves ready for opening. One of the good things about night shift is that you’re allowed to have headphones on to listen to your own music. Like nearly everyone there, I take advantage of this.

My work playlist is best described as eclectic, spanning a few hundred years and several genres. I also have a habit of singing or humming under my breath as I work, usually without even realising I’m doing it. Most people ignore this or can’t hear it through their own music, but sometimes I get comments on my musical choices.

I once got comments from the person who’d been paying enough attention to my singing to realise that I had metal, pop, classical, and showtunes all mixed together, among other genres. This annoyed him, enough to call me a “fake metalhead” and demand that metal not be mixed in with “lesser music.”

My response was a very mature one: I unpaired my headphones, searched a specific song, and played it through my phone’s speakers. It was from a metal band’s most recent album, but it was most definitely not a metal song, instead being a choral arrangement of a poem.

He had no answer for that… especially as the manager for that section started yelling for him to get back to his own department and stop harassing me.